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The union vowed to do everything in its power to ensure Congress members who vote to fund DHS are voted out.
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The largest nurses' union in the U.S. has demanded the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after a federal agent shot and killed nurse Alex Pretti on Saturday, joining a rapidly growing chorus calling for Congress to do away with the rogue agency.
In a statement, National Nurses United (NNU) strongly condemned the killing of Pretti, saying the shooting demonstrates the “violence, terror, and lawlessness” and “dire public health threat” that federal immigration agencies pose to communities nationwide.
“The nation's nurses, who make it their mission to care for and save human lives, are horrified and outraged that immigration agents have once again committed cold-blooded murder of a public observer who posed no threat to them,” NNU said. “ICE agents have been kidnapping hard working people — mothers, fathers, and children — and now murdered a registered nurse, one of the most trusted professions in the country.”
“Nurses demand the immediate abolition of ICE,” the group said. “Abolish ICE now.”
Pretti, 37, was an intensive care nurse at a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital. He was shot and killed by a Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agent on Saturday as he was filming immigration agents conducting a raid on a Minneapolis street. Videos from bystanders showed multiple agents tackling him, taking his gun, and then shooting at him at least 10 times, killing him.
In their statement, NNU called on the Senate to block the funding package for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) slated to come to a vote this week. Senate Democrats have said that they are going to block the vote, but Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer reportedly told his caucus in a call on Sunday not to back calls to abolish the agency; instead, he said, the message must be to “restrain, reform and restrict ICE.”
On the date of the general strike in Minneapolis on Friday, just a day before Pretti's killing, NNU had put out a statement condemning the House for its passage of the DHS appropriations bill.
The union, which has 225,000 members, has pledged to do “everything in our power” to get any members of Congress who vote to pass funding for ICE voted out of office.
Pretti was also a union member, part of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which condemned his killing in a statement, but did not name ICE.
Other nurses' unions have spoken out, including the Oregon Nurses Association, which said: “Provision 8.2 of the American Nurses Association Code of Ethics for Nurses is clear: ‘Where there are human rights violations, nurses ought to and must stand up for those rights and demand accountability.' That is exactly what Alex was doing.”
Those who knew Pretti have described him as a man who was drawn to nursing and opposed to ICE's raids because of his deep care for people and passion for helping those in need. Pretti's family condemned the Trump administration's “sickening lies” about Pretti, as officials sought to label him as a terrorist and “would-be assassin” after the shooting.
NNU's statement adds to growing calls for the abolition of ICE, which, along with DHS and CBP, was created under the Bush administration in order to surveil Americans and enforce the global “war on terror” at home, to disastrous effect.
Pretti was the second person to be shot and killed by federal agents on the streets of Minneapolis in a matter of weeks, with agents killing Renee Nicole Good earlier this month.
As a result of escalating ICE violence, polls have found rapidly increasing support for abolishing ICE. Whereas data analyzed by Civiqs in January 2025 found that only 24 percent of Americans supported abolishing the agency, a YouGov/Economist poll found last week that 45 percent now support the idea, tied with those opposed.
Progressive nonprofits are the latest target caught in Trump's crosshairs. With the aim of eliminating political opposition, Trump and his sycophants are working to curb government funding, constrain private foundations, and even cut tax-exempt status from organizations he dislikes.
We're concerned, because Truthout is not immune to such bad-faith attacks.
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Sharon Zhang is a news writer at Truthout covering politics, climate and labor. Before coming to Truthout, Sharon had written stories for Pacific Standard, The New Republic, and more. She has a master's degree in environmental studies. She can be found on Twitter and Bluesky.
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NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has told Europe it should “keep on dreaming” if it thinks it can defend itself without the support of the United States.
“If anyone thinks here again that the European Union, or Europe as a whole, can defend itself without the US, keep on dreaming. You can't. We can't. We need each other,” Rutte said during an address to the European Parliament in Brussels on Monday.
The NATO chief warned European nations they would need to increase defense spending to 10% if they “really want to do it alone,” adding they would need to build up their own nuclear capability, costing billions of euros.
“In that scenario, you will lose the ultimate guarantor of our freedom, which is the US nuclear umbrella. So hey, good luck,” he said.
The comments came after a rollercoaster week for Europe and its Western allies, after President Donald Trump continued to advance his demands for the US ownership of Greenland, before publicly ruling out the use of force to annex the Arctic island during his speech at World Economic Forum in Switzerland's Davos.
The NATO chief continued to praise Trump for raising the issue of Arctic security, acknowledging his defense of the president would likely irritate many in the room.
“I think he's right. There is an issue with the Arctic region. There is an issue of collective security, because these sea lanes are opening up, and because the Chinese and the Russians are more and more active,” he said.
Rutte outlined there would be two work streams going forward regarding the Greenland issue. The first would involve NATO taking more collective responsibility for the defense of the Arctic, to prevent Russia and China's access to the region, both militarily and economically.
Rinse and Repeat: Western allies ready for next rollercoaster with Donald Trump
The second would involve the continuation of trilateral discussions between the US, Denmark and Greenland. Rutte said he would not be involved in the discussions, adding that he has no mandate to negotiate on behalf of Denmark, and will not do so.
Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen and his Greenlandic counterpart Vivian Motzfeld met with Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Washington earlier this month. Rasmussen said the meeting was “constructive” but that a “fundamental disagreement” persists.
The following week, Trump and Rutte met in Davos, with the president claiming he had reached a framework for a Greenland deal with the NATO chief, and as a result said he would no longer impose tariffs on European nations that had opposed his ambitions to acquire the semi-autonomous territory of Denmark. It's not yet fully clear what's included in the framework, or Rutte's exact role in the negotiations, but Trump's stunning about-turn once again shone the spotlight on the NATO secretary general.
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The agency oversees rules that keep airplanes in the sky and prevent gas pipelines from exploding, among other things.
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The Trump administration is planning to use artificial intelligence to write federal transportation regulations, according to U.S. Department of Transportation records and interviews with six agency staffers.
The plan was presented to DOT staff last month at a demonstration of AI's “potential to revolutionize the way we draft rulemakings,” agency attorney Daniel Cohen wrote to colleagues. The demonstration, Cohen wrote, would showcase “exciting new AI tools available to DOT rule writers to help us do our job better and faster.”
Discussion of the plan continued among agency leadership last week, according to meeting notes reviewed by ProPublica. Gregory Zerzan, the agency's general counsel, said at that meeting that President Donald Trump is “very excited about this initiative.” Zerzan seemed to suggest that the DOT was at the vanguard of a broader federal effort, calling the department the “point of the spear” and “the first agency that is fully enabled to use AI to draft rules.”
Zerzan appeared interested mainly in the quantity of regulations that AI could produce, not their quality. “We don't need the perfect rule on XYZ. We don't even need a very good rule on XYZ,” he said, according to the meeting notes. “We want good enough.” Zerzan added, “We're flooding the zone.”
These developments have alarmed some at DOT. The agency's rules touch virtually every facet of transportation safety, including regulations that keep airplanes in the sky, prevent gas pipelines from exploding and stop freight trains carrying toxic chemicals from skidding off the rails. Why, some staffers wondered, would the federal government outsource the writing of such critical standards to a nascent technology notorious for making mistakes?
The answer from the plan's boosters is simple: speed. Writing and revising complex federal regulations can take months, sometimes years. But, with DOT's version of Google Gemini, employees could generate a proposed rule in a matter of minutes or even seconds, two DOT staffers who attended the December demonstration remembered the presenter saying. In any case, most of what goes into the preambles of DOT regulatory documents is just “word salad,” one staffer recalled the presenter saying. Google Gemini can do word salad.
Zerzan reiterated the ambition to accelerate rulemaking with AI at the meeting last week. The goal is to dramatically compress the timeline in which transportation regulations are produced, such that they could go from idea to complete draft ready for review by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in just 30 days, he said. That should be possible, he said, because “it shouldn't take you more than 20 minutes to get a draft rule out of Gemini.”
The DOT plan, which has not previously been reported, represents a new front in the Trump administration's campaign to incorporate artificial intelligence into the work of the federal government. This administration is not the first to use AI; federal agencies have been gradually stitching the technology into their work for years, including to translate documents, analyze data and categorize public comments, among other uses. But the current administration has been particularly enthusiastic about the technology. Trump released multiple executive orders in support of AI last year. In April, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought circulated a memo calling for the acceleration of its use by the federal government. Three months later, the administration released an “AI Action Plan” that contained a similar directive. None of those documents, however, called explicitly for using AI to write regulations, as DOT is now planning to do.
Those plans are already in motion. The department has used AI to draft a still-unpublished Federal Aviation Administration rule, according to a DOT staffer briefed on the matter.
Skeptics say that so-called large language models such as Gemini and ChatGPT shouldn't be trusted with the complicated and consequential responsibilities of governance, given that those models are prone to error and incapable of human reasoning. But proponents see AI as a way to automate mindless tasks and wring efficiencies out of a slow-moving federal bureaucracy.
Such optimism was on display in a windowless conference room in Northern Virginia earlier this month, where federal technology officials, convened at an AI summit, discussed adopting an “AI culture” in government and “upskilling” the federal workforce to use the technology. Those federal representatives included Justin Ubert, division chief for cybersecurity and operations at DOT's Federal Transit Administration, who spoke on a panel about the Transportation Department's plans for “fast adoption” of artificial intelligence. Many people see humans as a “choke point” that slows down AI, he noted. But eventually, Ubert predicted, humans will fall back into merely an oversight role, monitoring “AI-to-AI interactions.” Ubert declined to speak to ProPublica on the record.
A similarly sanguine attitude about the potential of AI permeated the presentation at DOT in December, which was attended by more than 100 DOT employees, including division heads, high-ranking attorneys and civil servants from rulemaking offices. Brimming with enthusiasm, the presenter told them that Gemini can handle 80% to 90% of the work of writing regulations, while DOT staffers could do the rest, one attendee recalled the presenter saying.
To illustrate this, the presenter asked for a suggestion from the audience of a topic on which DOT may have to write a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, a public filing that lays out an agency's plans to introduce a new regulation or change an existing one. He then plugged the topic keywords into Gemini, which produced a document resembling a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. It appeared, however, to be missing the actual text that goes into the Code of Federal Regulations, one staffer recalled.
The presenter expressed little concern that the regulatory documents produced by AI could contain so-called hallucinations — erroneous text that is frequently generated by large language models such as Gemini — according to three people present. In any case, that's where DOT's staff would come in, he said. “It seemed like his vision of the future of rulemaking at DOT is that our jobs would be to proofread this machine product,” one employee said. “He was very excited.” (Attendees could not clearly recall the name of the lead presenter, but three said they believed it was Brian Brotsos, the agency's acting chief AI officer. Brotsos declined to comment, referring questions to the DOT press office.)
A spokesperson for the DOT did not respond to a request for comment; Cohen and Zerzan also did not respond to messages seeking comment. A Google spokesperson did not provide a comment.
The December presentation left some DOT staffers deeply skeptical. Rulemaking is intricate work, they said, requiring expertise in the subject at hand as well as in existing statutes, regulations and case law. Mistakes or oversights in DOT regulations could lead to lawsuits or even injuries and deaths in the transportation system. Some rule writers have decades of experience. But all that seemed to go ignored by the presenter, attendees said. “It seems wildly irresponsible,” said one, who, like the others, requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.
Mike Horton, DOT's former acting chief artificial intelligence officer, criticized the plan to use Gemini to write regulations, comparing it to “having a high school intern that's doing your rulemaking.” (He said the plan was not in the works when he left the agency in August.) Noting the life-or-death stakes of transportation safety regulations, Horton said the agency's leaders “want to go fast and break things, but going fast and breaking things means people are going to get hurt.”
Academics and researchers who track the use of AI in government expressed mixed opinions about the DOT plan. If agency rule writers use the technology as a sort of research assistant with plenty of supervision and transparency, it could be useful and save time. But if they cede too much responsibility to AI, that could lead to deficiencies in critical regulations and run afoul of a requirement that federal rules be built on reasoned decision-making.
“Just because these tools can produce a lot of words doesn't mean that those words add up to a high-quality government decision,” said Bridget Dooling, a professor at Ohio State University who studies administrative law. “It's so tempting to try to figure out how to use these tools, and I think it would make sense to try. But I think it should be done with a lot of skepticism.”
Ben Winters, the AI and privacy director at the Consumer Federation of America, said the plan was especially problematic given the exodus of subject-matter experts from government as a result of the administration's cuts to the federal workforce last year. DOT has had a net loss of nearly 4,000 of its 57,000 employees since Trump returned to the White House, including more than 100 attorneys, federal data shows.
Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency was a major proponent of AI adoption in government. In July, The Washington Post reported on a leaked DOGE presentation that called for using AI to eliminate half of all federal regulations, and to do so in part by having AI draft regulatory documents. “Writing is automated,” the presentation read. DOGE's AI program “automatically drafts all submission documents for attorneys to edit.” DOGE and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
The White House did not answer a question about whether the administration is planning to use AI in rulemaking at other agencies as well. Four top technology officials in the administration said they were not aware of any such plan. As for DOT's “point of the spear” claim, two of those officials expressed skepticism. “There's a lot of posturing of, ‘We want to seem like a leader in federal AI adoption,'” one said. “I think it's very much a marketing thing.”
Progressive nonprofits are the latest target caught in Trump's crosshairs. With the aim of eliminating political opposition, Trump and his sycophants are working to curb government funding, constrain private foundations, and even cut tax-exempt status from organizations he dislikes.
We're concerned, because Truthout is not immune to such bad-faith attacks.
We can only resist Trump's attacks by cultivating a strong base of support. The right-wing mediasphere is funded comfortably by billionaire owners and venture capitalist philanthropists. At Truthout, we have you.
Truthout has launched a fundraiser, and we have only 72 hours left to raise $25,000. Please take a meaningful action in the fight against authoritarianism: make a one-time or monthly donation to Truthout. If you have the means, please dig deep.
Jesse Coburn is a reporter at ProPublica. He joined the newsroom in 2024 after three years as an investigative reporter at Streetsblog NYC. His series there on the black market for temporary license plates led to enacted or proposed laws in three states as well as civil penalties and criminal investigations. Previously, Coburn was a reporter at Newsday, where his reporting on wrongdoing in Long Island local governments spurred investigations and reforms. Coburn's reporting has received a George Polk Award, an IRE Award, a Sidney Award, a Deadline Club Award and other distinctions. He was also a finalist for the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting.
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Trump's attorney general demanded records on Medicaid and food aid programs and that Walz repeal sanctuary policies.
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As Minnesota residents and people across the U.S. were reeling from the killing of protester Alex Pretti by Border Patrol agents on Saturday — the second fatal shooting by federal immigration agents in the city in less than three weeks — U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to Governor Tim Walz, telling him it is in his power to “restore the rule of law” in his state.
One suggestion the attorney general gave amounted to a “shakedown,” said US Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), and had nothing to do with the Trump administration's persistent claims that immigrants have caused a crisis in Minnesota. Bondi demanded the Democratic governor turn over voter rolls for the state, as she has called on all 50 states and Washington, D.C. to do, prompting legal challenges from voting rights groups and voters.
Bondi wrote that Walz must allow the Department of Justice (DOJ) to access voter rolls to “confirm that Minnesota's voter registration practices comply with federal law.”
“Fulfilling this commonsense request will better guarantee free and fair elections and boost confidence in the rule of law,” she wrote.
Gallego accused the DOJ of “using fear to get their hands on voter information.”
Pam Bondi sent a letter to Minnesota officials saying hand over the voter rolls, or ICE won't back off. That's a shakedown. They're using fear to get their hands on voter information. In America, you don't get to strong-arm your way into our elections. pic.twitter.com/IbJc3ufl9k
The Trump administration filed a federal lawsuit last September against Minnesota and several other Democrat-governed states to demand personal information for all voters, including driver's license numbers and the last four digits of their Social Security numbers.
Considering President Donald Trump's persistent, debunked claims of so-called “voter fraud” in the 2020 election, including the baseless claim that noncitizens are permitted by Democratic governors to vote in federal elections, advocates have said the DOJ's demands for voter rolls are aimed at further spreading lies and misinformation.
In the letter, Bondi also denounced Minnesota officials for speaking out against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the wake of an ICE agent's fatal shooting of Renee Good earlier this month, saying a “national tragedy” has resulted from the “anti-law enforcement rhetoric.”
The “tragedy” the attorney general was referring to wasn't the killings of Good and Pretti, but a rise in “violence against ICE officers and agents” that the Trump administration has cited frequently. She didn't provide examples of violent attacks in the letter.
She also demanded that Walz turn over records on Medicaid and food assistance programs and “repeal sanctuary policies that have led to so much crime and violence in your state” — also providing no evidence of such a rise. According to data from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the Minneapolis Police Department, crime has gone down in recent years.
Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said Bondi's letter suggested that Minnesota can expect more violence from federal immigration officers unless Walz turns over his constituents' sensitive data.
This isn't leadership. This is blackmail. The Department of Justice has now told Minnesota officials that they will remove ICE if they hand over their voter rolls – this is not how the law works. pic.twitter.com/V9udMnJgPn
“They're not entitled to that data,” said Fontes. “This is blackmail. This is the way organized crime works. They move into your neighborhood, they start beating everybody up, and then they extort what they want. This is not how America is supposed to work, and I'm embarrassed that the administration is pushing in this direction.”
Melanie D'Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, noted that Bondi's demand came days after the DOJ acknowledged that a group aimed at challenging election results reached out to two Department of Government Efficiency Employees who were working at the Social Security Administration and requested they analyze state voter rolls.
“This is not a coincidence,” said D'Arrigo. “Authoritarians crave legitimacy, and manipulated election results can provide that.”
Progressive nonprofits are the latest target caught in Trump's crosshairs. With the aim of eliminating political opposition, Trump and his sycophants are working to curb government funding, constrain private foundations, and even cut tax-exempt status from organizations he dislikes.
We're concerned, because Truthout is not immune to such bad-faith attacks.
We can only resist Trump's attacks by cultivating a strong base of support. The right-wing mediasphere is funded comfortably by billionaire owners and venture capitalist philanthropists. At Truthout, we have you.
Truthout has launched a fundraiser, and we have only 72 hours left to raise $25,000. Please take a meaningful action in the fight against authoritarianism: make a one-time or monthly donation to Truthout. If you have the means, please dig deep.
Julia Conley is a staff writer for Common Dreams.
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Nearly 800,000 customers were without power on Jan. 26 after a widespread, long-lasting winter storm spread ice and snow across the country, as tens of millions were under some form of cold-weather warning or advisory.
CoLab chief technology officer Jeremy Andres, left, and CEO Adam Keating. Venture Newfoundland and Labrador LP is one of North America's best-performing venture capital funds of its age, in part from its early support in the company.Supplied
Expectations weren't high when the Newfoundland and Labrador government committed $10-million in 2014 to a new venture capital fund that would finance homegrown tech startups. St. John's barely registered as a tech hub. Other than the Business Development Bank of Canada, which kicked in another $2-million, just nine investors put up a further $2-million combined, despite the lure of a 30-per-cent tax credit.
One of them, Shopify angel investor, philanthropist and part-time Newfoundland resident John Phillips, saw his $1-million investment as more of a “social ecosystem support” effort to help “a small out-of-the-way place, with an expectation we were not going to make any money,” he said in an interview.
St. John's has since emerged as one of the country's most fertile small-city startup centres – and the fund, Venture Newfoundland and Labrador LP (VNLI), is one of North America's best-performing venture capital investment vehicles of its vintage, due to its early support of two of Canada's hottest startups, CoLab AI Inc. and Spellbook.
Cash from away: CoLab raises $72-million as hot St. John's tech scene draws global investors
VNLI, managed by St. John's-based Pelorus Venture Capital Ltd., has already repaid investors $21-million – or $1.50 for every $1 they put into the fund. It sits on a further $40-million-plus worth of investments and has generated an average net internal rate of return of 24 per cent.
Its second, $26-million fund, anchored with $13-million from the province, launched at the 2021 tech market peak. It has generated an 11-per-cent average annual return to date, putting it in the top quartile of that year's funds.
Now, as St. John's companies attract global attention, Pelorus is doubling down. On Monday, Pelorus said it has secured $20-million for its third fund, VNLIII, with $15-million from the province and $5-million from Mr. Phillips' investment company, Klister Credit Corp. The goal is to reach $50-million and “we're quite confident that number will be achieved,” said Pelorus president Chris Moyer, who is based in Windsor, N.S.
“For more than a decade, Pelorus has shown how early investment can help local companies grow, create good jobs, and attract new investment to our province,” said Lin Paddock, Minister of Jobs, Growth and Rural Development, in a release. The new fund “marks an important step forward for our technology sector.”
Despite the larger target fund size, the mandate of Pelorus – named for a marine navigation instrument that helps vessels maintain their bearings – has not changed, said Mr. Moyer. The fund will aim to make 10 to 15 pre-seed-stage investments in fledgling companies in the province, providing $500,000 to $1-million apiece initially, with more set aside than in past funds for follow-on rounds.
And while the province has kicked in more with each fund, its share of the capital has gone down – assuming Pelorus hits its goal – to 30 per cent in Fund III from 71 per cent in VNLI.
St. John's benefits from a few favourable attributes for startups. The small, tight-knit city is home to Memorial University and locals have shown a desire to stay or come home to build their companies. That includes CoLab, which sells a cloud-based platform for engineers to help manage collaborative projects. Co-founders Adam Keating and Jeremy Andrews returned home to build CoLab after doing co-op placements with U.S. innovators including Tesla Inc.
There has been steady government support for startups, as well as investments from another prominent local financier – Mark Dobbin's Killick Capital. And due to the province's remoteness and small population size, startups must start out thinking globally .
St. John's has also produced a huge winner that inspired other local entrepreneurs: fraud detection software maker Verafin Inc., which was bought by Nasdaq Inc. in 2020 for US$2.75-billion. Investors from away in Spellbook and CoLab include Silicon Valley-based Khosla Ventures and Intrepid Growth Partners, co-founded by ex-Canada Pension Plan Investment Board CEO Mark Machin.
Mr. Moyer compared the province to Estonia, the small, former Soviet republic that has produced 10 tech ventures valued at US$1-billion or more, including Skype.
Seven tech firms joined Canada's $100-million club in 2025 – and 2026 could bring even more
Pelorus was created at the behest of a provincial government bureaucrat who encouraged the principals of the labour-sponsored GrowthWorks Atlantic Venture Fund – including Mr. Moyer – to create a new fund. The timing was good; GrowthWorks Atlantic was beginning to liquidate its portfolio and later wound down.
Mr. Moyer said others cautioned him early on that Verafin was a one-off success. “Well, CoLab and Spellbook have proven that wrong,” he said, noting that two or three of the 16 companies Pelorus has backed are looking to raise follow-on capital this year. “The companies keep on coming” and Pelorus doesn't fund them just because they are local, he said. “We are going to fund companies like they're anywhere else, we're going to treat them like they're anywhere else, we'll treat valuations like they're anywhere else.
Mr. Phillips, who has co-invested in three Pelorus startups, agreed: “I wonder sometimes if deal flow will start to ebb,” he said. “But I don't see any signs of this.”
Other companies in the Pelorus portfolio include Mantle, a platform for managing revenue for Shopify app developers founded by ex-Shopify employees from Newfoundland, smart thermometer maker Mysa and Sparrow BioAcoustics, whose technology turns smartphones into stethoscope replacements.
Mr. Keating in an e-mail called Pelorus “one of our strongest supporters and a critical resource for us to lean on when making big decisions. They are almost like having another founder at the table.”
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EDITOR'S NOTE: CNN Style is one of the official media partners of Paris Fashion Week. See all coverage here.
Fashion is not a dignified business. It is messy, constantly changing and prone to disposability — of ideas, trends and especially people.
So it was heartening to see a fashion house celebrate, with pitch-perfect dignity, the departure of one of its longtime designers at Paris Men's Fashion Week on Saturday night. Véronique Nichanian, who for almost four decades oversaw men's clothing at Hermès, marked her final outing with a show that provided a rare moment of elegance in a tumultuous fashion business, and a collection that underscored how this ultra lowkey designer has created a pragmatic lavishness that countless contemporaries have copied in vain.
Nichanian revealed in October that she would depart the French luxury house after 38 years. A respectful few days later, Hermès announced the 71-year-old's successor: Grace Wales Bonner, the British millennial darling whose quiet intelligence has helped her build a small empire on sophisticated, self-assured clothes.
What can't a man wear? Designers push the boundaries at Paris Men's Fashion Week
Such a seamless, peaceful transition of power is wincingly rare in fashion, and stands out against the wider industry mood. Over the past year and a half, in what some have called the “great fashion reset,” designers have been swapped, chopped, substituted for one another and dismissed with seemingly little humanity or under outrageous pressure. An unsettled air now hangs over fashion weeks and flagship stores, where there should be excitement about new ideas. If anyone can leave at any time, or brands change their identity at the drop of a CEO's hat, how do you know what you're buying into when you purchase a handbag or coat? What does it all stand for, aside from a ruthlessness that, while certainly glamorous, feels so ambivalent?
Rather than a romp through her greatest hits on Saturday, Nichanian instead focused on her mandate, just as she's always done: making extraordinarily beautiful clothes for the man who seeks the best in life. Not the flashiest or most fashionable, but the most exquisitely made, the most precise.
Her final collection featured sweaters and scarves crafted from such pure and sweet wool that they bounced with each step; suits slimmed but were not cloyingly youthful. Slightly cropped trousers revealed the shaft of sublime flat boots. A leather suit was stitched with a whisper of chalky pinstripe. There were clothes for Travis Scott (like a crocodile suit), who was sat on the front row; for the man who loves great clothes but is skeptical of “fashion” (loose leather trousers); and for the one who's feeling a little naughty (a brown coat with punch-pink lining).
The show demonstrated how Nichanian has pioneered a language that every brand, from The Row to Uniqlo, is now attempting to recreate in their quest for clothing that transcends trend and time. For too many designers and shoppers today, the pleasure and invention of clothes boils down to something simplistic: mere perfection. Fashion has been remade into the hunt for the “perfect” sweater, the “perfect” trouser or the “right” Oxford shoe. But of course, perfection isn't human, and so we find ourselves searching for timelessness as a defense against a world that refuses to stop changing, for better or worse.
As Nichanian has shown, season after season, it is design, not perfection, that makes clothing peerless. Why else show nubby fleece trousers with a coordinating striped jacket, which nobody needs but would be a hoot to wear? If we are to take away one thing from the Nichanian ethos, it is that clothes should not be “timeless” or strive towards perfection, but be good enough, so that, whatever happens, we feel right.
And that points to Nichanian's greatest strength — and one we would all do well to embrace: longevity. These days, doing anything for longer than a few years can mean risking irrelevance. Longevity means going to work dutifully and doing your job. In fashion, specifically, it means you have honored your customers and put their wishes and needs above an ego that might push you to greener, or stranger, pastures. You see what people want, sometimes before they know they want it and other times just when they've dreamed about it — both are essential. You must be creative but, almost impossibly, on an industry schedule that demands collections twice a year or more.
Nichanian liked to say she didn't design clothing but “vêtements-objets” — clothing as objects, lovely to behold and even more delightful to use. She made the excesses of fashion look pointless without turning to something monastic; instead, she offered sensible sumptuousness. Lines and silhouettes may have morphed over the decades, but her fundamentals remained.
After the models' finale, Nichanian strolled down the runway as an audience of hundreds of clients, celebrities and editors offered her a five-minute standing ovation. She embraced Hermès' artistic director; Eric Clapton's “Forever Man” played; screens hanging from the ceiling played loops of Nichanian bowing at shows throughout her tenure. It was grand but not sentimental, and she grinned and waved like royalty without lingering. She seemed to know that this marvelous chapter of her life was over, and there is more fun to be had elsewhere.
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Chris Madel, a Minneapolis lawyer who represented the immigration agent who fatally shot Renee Good, said Monday that he was ending his Republican campaign for governor of Minnesota after a second protester was killed by federal authorities.
“I cannot support the national Republicans' stated retribution on the citizens of our state,” Madel said in a video message he posted on social media, “nor can I count myself a member of a party that would do so.”
Madel, who has never held elected office, launched his candidacy in December as a political outsider and a fierce defender of law enforcement. One of nearly a dozen candidates in the Republican primary for governor, Madel had been endorsed by the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis.
He gained attention this month for providing legal representation to Jonathan Ross, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who shot Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis woman, on January 7.
“Operation Metro Surge has expanded far beyond its stated focus on true public safety threat,” Madel said in his message. “United States citizens, particularly those of color, live in fear. United States citizens are carrying papers to prove their citizenship. That's wrong.”
He said too many US citizens in Minnesota have been detained by ICE “due to the color of their skin.” He also assailed the Department of Homeland Security's move to enter homes without a criminal warrant, as revealed in a whistleblower complaint.
“Driving while Hispanic is not a crime,” he said. “Neither is driving while Asian.”
The decision from Madel comes after federal agents killed Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center who was protesting immigration actions. A CNN video analysis appears to show a federal immigration officer removing a gun from Pretti just prior to officers fatally shooting him.
“I have to look my daughters in the eye and tell them, ‘I believe I did what was right,'” Madel said. “And I am doing that today.”
Madel's blistering critique of the Trump administration's actions are notable given his legal assistance for Ross. His comments come as some Republicans nationally are beginning to question the actions of federal agents.
The escalating tensions in Minnesota have roiled the state's politics three weeks after Gov. Tim Walz ended his reelection bid in the wake of a deepening federal investigation into a scandal over social services programs in Minnesota.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar filed paperwork last week to form a campaign committee to run for governor. She delayed a formal announcement after Pretti's killing, saying she was more focused on trying to get ICE agents out of Minnesota than launching a campaign.
The remaining Republican candidates for governor include Lisa Demuth, the speaker of the Minnesota House, who is the highest-ranking Republican in the state. Demuth on Monday praised President Donald Trump's announcement that border czar Tom Homan would be traveling to Minnesota, calling it “an opportunity for a reset” between federal and state authorities.
Madel appeared to be gaining ground, often finishing in the top share of Republican challengers in unofficial party straw polls.
No Republican candidate has won a statewide election in Minnesota since 2006 – a fact Madel noted in his video message.
“National Republicans have made it nearly impossible for a Republican to win a statewide election in Minnesota,” he said.
This story has been updated with additional information.
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US senator warned that Republicans would lose elections if prices continue to rise, prompting president to respond ‘fuck you, Ted'
US politics live – latest updates
Ted Cruz warned Donald Trump, his fellow Republican, that he would face a “bloodbath” in the November midterm elections if prices continued to rise, prompting the president to respond, “fuck you, Ted,” the US senator told donors, according to a secret recording of the private conversation obtained by Axios.
Cruz reportedly delivered the reality check to the president in a phone conversation after Trump unveiled sweeping tariffs a few months after returning to the Oval Office in early 2025. The president was unhappy, Cruz said – and yelled and cursed in a conversation with Republican senators.
“Mr President, if we get to November of [2026] and people's 401(k)s are down 30% and prices are up 10–20% at the supermarket, we're going to go into election day, face a bloodbath,” Cruz said he told the president, according to Axios. “You're going to lose the House, you're going to lose the Senate, you're going to spend the next two years being impeached every single week.”
Only 34% approve of how Trump has handled the cost of living while 64% disapprove, according to a recent New York Times/Siena poll. There is also evidence the economy may be motivating those who voted for Trump in 2024 but now disapprove of him, according to the Times.
Cruz also reportedly attacked JD Vance in the recordings, tying the vice-president to conservative media figure Tucker Carlson, whom he has accused of trying to thwart the president's foreign policy agenda. Cruz had a heated interview with Carlson last year that exposed a significant divide on the right on foreign affairs.
“Tucker created JD. JD is Tucker's protégé, and they are one and the same,” Cruz reportedly said. He also accused the vice-president and Carlson of ousting Mike Waltz, the national security adviser, because Waltz supported bombing Iran.
A spokesperson for Cruz's office did not immediately return a request for comment.
The USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group is now in the Indian Ocean, putting it closer to assist in any potential US operations targeting Iran, two sources told CNN.
The group is within the area of responsibility of US Central Command, whose purview includes military operations in the Middle East.
Still, the carrier is not necessarily in a final position for any potential operation. President Donald Trump continues to consider options for striking Iran, but there is no indication any decision has been made.
A carrier strike group normally includes an aircraft carrier, guided missile cruisers, anti-aircraft warships and anti-submarine destroyers or frigates.
CNN has previously reported the carrier was en route to the region.
Allies have been urging the US to forestall any military action.
In Iran, the death toll from the government's crackdown on protesters continues to climb. On Sunday, the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) reported that 5,520 protesters have been killed since demonstrations started late last month. It said that an additional 17,091 deaths were still being reviewed.
Trump has warned Iran against killing protesters, repeatedly threatening to intervene in the country if it does so. Last week, however, he said that Iran “wants to talk,” suggesting that the US may enter discussions with Tehran.
Meanwhile, the Islamic Republic is bracing for a potential US attack. In Tehran, a large mural was unveiled in Revolution Square on Sunday depicting a swarm of jet fighters flying over a warship bearing the US flag.
During Friday prayers in the capital, the imam leading the sermon warned the US against launching any attacks.
“The trillion dollars you invested in the region are under the watch of our missiles,” Mohammad Ali Akbari said.
Iran has been escalating its rhetoric against the US over the past week, warning that any attack would be met with force capable of destabilizing the entire Middle East.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei told journalists Monday that Tehran is “more than capable” of responding to any aggression from the US with a “regretful” response.
“The arrival of one or several warships does not impact Iran's defensive determination,” he said. “Our armed forces are monitoring every development and are not wasting a single second to enhance their capabilities.”
On Saturday, the Iranian military said its missile capabilities and efficiency have increased significantly since the 12-day war with Israel in June. Iran launched multiple waves of missile and drone attacks at Israeli targets during that conflict, which started after Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran last year, killing several top military commanders and nuclear scientists. The United States later joined, targeting key Iranian nuclear facilities.
Iran possesses a large arsenal of medium- and long-range ballistic missiles, several types of which were fired at Israel during the conflict. Its drones, a pillar of its military power, have also been deployed beyond its borders, including in Russia's war in Ukraine.
Maj. Gen. Ali Abdollahi, the commander of Iran's Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters, a key military operational command, said last week that any aggression against his country “will immediately turn all American interests, bases and centers of influence into legitimate, definite and accessible targets” for Iran.
Iranian officials have also warned that a US attack would lead to strikes on Washington's allies in the region. US-allied Arab nations in the Persian Gulf have lobbied Trump against a strike, according to regional officials speaking to CNN this month.
Iran also has a network of regional proxies that could potentially be mobilized in the event of a strike. While some of its surrogates, such as Hezbollah, have been significantly weakened by Israel over the past two years, others remain heavily armed.
On Sunday, Abu Hussein al-Hamidawi, the commander of Kataeb Hezbollah, a pro-Iranian militia in Iraq, called on Iran's loyalists “across the globe … to prepare for all-out war in support of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
“We tell the enemies, the war against the (Islamic) Republic, will not be a walk in the park,” he said.
CNN's Nadeen Ebrahim contributed to this report.
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A coalition of Minnesota's biggest employers—including Target, 3M, and UnitedHealth Group—issued a joint appeal on Jan. 25, calling for a de-escalation of tensions following the fatal shooting of a 37-year-old man by a Border Patrol agent during an immigration enforcement operation in Minneapolis.
CNN's Sara Sidner breaks down what DHS has said about the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti and what videos taken by bystanders show and speaks with a neighbor of Pretti's, who says ‘everything they say about my neighbor is a lie.'
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This is Kollen Post reporting from Kyiv on day 1,433 of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Today's top story: Russia has yet to use Iranian missiles in its war on Ukraine
Iran gave hundreds of its missiles to Russia as a gift to help in its war on Ukraine. So far, they've been plagued by failure to launch.
Ukrainian intelligence told the Kyiv Independent on Jan. 26 that of the over 350 Fath-360 missiles that Iran has given Russia, none has come down on Ukraine.
Those dormant Fath missiles contrast with Russia's use of North Korea ballistic missiles, widely seen as shoddy but reportedly improved thanks to Russian assistance. Russia's seeming disinterest in Iran-supplied Faths could be seen a passive indictment of a missile program that Iran has invested in heavily.
Iranian-designed Shaheds have proved themselves a mainstay of the war in Ukraine, but these days Russia is producing the vast majority of its own supply rather than buying them from Iran, which is currently engaged in a brutal crackdown on protests against the current regime.
The Council of Europe has a new plan to cut off its continuing dependence on Russian natural gas – next year.
The EU just gave final approval to the new plan, with barring liquified natural gas by the beginning of 2027 and pipeline natural gas by autumn of the same year.
The European bloc remains the largest buyer of both pipeline and liquified natural gas from Russia, despite widespread calls to pull away from economic contact with Moscow.
Russia's Jan. 24 air attack damaged the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, a holy site in Eastern Orthodoxy and a UNESCO heritage location, an official said on Jan. 26.
"For the first time since the days of the second world war, as a result of military activity the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra was struck," general director of the historical preserve Maksym Ostapenko, told Interfax-Ukraine. "Each time, Moscow has been behind it, as happened in 1918; as happened when, by an order from Moscow, the Uspensk (Dormition) Cathedral was blown up in 1941, and, by an order from Moscow, Shaheds and missiles now fly throughout Kyiv, including those that now inflict damage on the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra."
The blasts on Jan. 24 blew out windows and damaged plaster on two of the buildings of the Lavra, which includes extensive underground cave complexes and looks out along the Dnipro River.
Ostapenko was re-appointed as the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra's general director earlier this month after a contentious firing last year. The Lavra itself has long been a zone of tensions due to alleged Russian influence through the orthodox church.
General Oleksandr Syrsky, Commander-in-Chief of Ukraine's Armed Forces, issued a stark warning about Russia's renewed assaults on Pokrovsk, the long-embattled city in western Donbas.
"The aggressor is not giving up attempts to break through; he is strengthening pressure and pulling up reserves," Syrsky wrote on Facebook on Jan. 26, reporting 400 clashes in the Pokrovsk and Ocheretyne areas.
One of Ukraine's fortress cities in the west of Donetsk Oblast, Pokrovsk has been a hot spot for Russian attacks for over a year and a half. Russian forces have taken most of the city but fighting continues in the northern areas.
Russian attacks killed at least three Ukrainians and injure 24 others over the past day, local authorities said on Jan. 26.
Russia launched 138 drones of various types at Ukraine overnight, Ukraine's Air Force reported, including roughly 90 Shahed-type drones. Ukrainian air defenses intercepted 110, but 21 drones struck 11 locations across the country, and drone debris was recorded at one additional site.
In Donetsk Oblast, two died and 13 were injured in Russian attacks on Druzhkivka and Oleksiivo-Druzhkivka, the local military administration reported, recording a total of 18 attacks on civilian areas.
Authorities evacuated 53 civilians from ares near the frontline, including 22 children.
In Kherson Oblast, Governor Oleksandr Prokudin reported one civilian dead in Russian attacks, which hit 29 municipalities including the city of Kherson itself.
Two other civilians went to the hospital with injuries including concussions resulting from a Jan. 24 drone strike on their balcony, the oblast government said.
In Sumy Oblast, which is facing renewed pressure from Russian attacks, authorities reported seven injuries among civilians, including a 59-year-old woman and her 8 and 11-year-old grandchildren.
The oblast fell under air alerts for all but 4.5 hours of the preceding day.
In Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, the local government reported continued attacks, particularly with FPV drones striking the Nikopol area. Russian attacks injured a 58-year-old man, but seemingly resulted in no deaths.
In Kharkiv Oblast, Russian attacks including several dozen drones damaged eight homes and apartment buildings throughout the oblast and injured an 80-year-old woman in the city of Kharkiv, Governor Oleh Syniehubov wrote on Telegram.
In Zaporizhzhia Oblast, Governor Ivan Fedorov reported 775 Russian strikes, which injured two civilians.
Russia has lost around 1,235,060 troops in Ukraine since the beginning of its full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, the General Staff of Ukraine's Armed Forces reported on Jan. 26.
The number includes 1,020 casualties that Russian forces suffered over the past day.
According to the report, Russia has also lost 11,608 tanks, 23,951 armored fighting vehicles, 75,906 vehicles and fuel tanks, 36,644 artillery systems, 1,626 multiple launch rocket systems, 1,286 air defense systems, 434 airplanes, 347 helicopters, 115б813 drones, 28 ships and boats, as well as two submarines.
Defense Industry Reporter
Kollen Post is the defense industry reporter at the Kyiv Independent. Based in Kyiv, he covers weapons production and defense tech. Originally from western Michigan, he speaks Russian and Ukrainian. His work has appeared in Radio Free Europe, Fortune, Breaking Defense, the Cipher Brief, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, FT's Sifted, and Science Magazine. He holds a BA from Vanderbilt University.
This is Kollen Post reporting from Kyiv on day 1,433 of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Today's top story: Russia has yet to use Iranian missiles in its war on Ukraine
Iran gave hundreds of its missiles to Russia as a gift to help in its war on Ukraine. So far, they've been plagued by failure to launch.
Ukrainian intelligence told the Kyiv Independent on Jan. 26 that of the over 350 Fath-360 missiles that Iran has given Russia, none has come down on Ukraine.
Those dormant Fath missiles contrast with Russia's use of North Korea ballistic missiles, widely seen as shoddy but reportedly improved thanks to Russian assistance. Russia's seeming disinterest in Iran-supplied Faths could be seen a passive indictment of a missile program that Iran has invested in heavily.
Iranian-designed Shaheds have proved themselves a mainstay of the war in Ukraine, but these days Russia is producing the vast majority of its own supply rather than buying them from Iran, which is currently engaged in a brutal crackdown on protests against the current regime.
The Council of Europe has a new plan to cut off its continuing dependence on Russian natural gas – next year.
The EU just gave final approval to the new plan, with barring liquified natural gas by the beginning of 2027 and pipeline natural gas by autumn of the same year.
The European bloc remains the largest buyer of both pipeline and liquified natural gas from Russia, despite widespread calls to pull away from economic contact with Moscow.
Russia's Jan. 24 air attack damaged the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, a holy site in Eastern Orthodoxy and a UNESCO heritage location, an official said on Jan. 26.
"For the first time since the days of the second world war, as a result of military activity the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra was struck," general director of the historical preserve Maksym Ostapenko, told Interfax-Ukraine. "Each time, Moscow has been behind it, as happened in 1918; as happened when, by an order from Moscow, the Uspensk (Dormition) Cathedral was blown up in 1941, and, by an order from Moscow, Shaheds and missiles now fly throughout Kyiv, including those that now inflict damage on the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra."
The blasts on Jan. 24 blew out windows and damaged plaster on two of the buildings of the Lavra, which includes extensive underground cave complexes and looks out along the Dnipro River.
Ostapenko was re-appointed as the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra's general director earlier this month after a contentious firing last year. The Lavra itself has long been a zone of tensions due to alleged Russian influence through the orthodox church.
General Oleksandr Syrsky, Commander-in-Chief of Ukraine's Armed Forces, issued a stark warning about Russia's renewed assaults on Pokrovsk, the long-embattled city in western Donbas.
"The aggressor is not giving up attempts to break through; he is strengthening pressure and pulling up reserves," Syrsky wrote on Facebook on Jan. 26, reporting 400 clashes in the Pokrovsk and Ocheretyne areas.
One of Ukraine's fortress cities in the west of Donetsk Oblast, Pokrovsk has been a hot spot for Russian attacks for over a year and a half. Russian forces have taken most of the city but fighting continues in the northern areas.
Russian attacks killed at least three Ukrainians and injure 24 others over the past day, local authorities said on Jan. 26.
Russia launched 138 drones of various types at Ukraine overnight, Ukraine's Air Force reported, including roughly 90 Shahed-type drones. Ukrainian air defenses intercepted 110, but 21 drones struck 11 locations across the country, and drone debris was recorded at one additional site.
In Donetsk Oblast, two died and 13 were injured in Russian attacks on Druzhkivka and Oleksiivo-Druzhkivka, the local military administration reported, recording a total of 18 attacks on civilian areas.
Authorities evacuated 53 civilians from ares near the frontline, including 22 children.
In Kherson Oblast, Governor Oleksandr Prokudin reported one civilian dead in Russian attacks, which hit 29 municipalities including the city of Kherson itself.
Two other civilians went to the hospital with injuries including concussions resulting from a Jan. 24 drone strike on their balcony, the oblast government said.
In Sumy Oblast, which is facing renewed pressure from Russian attacks, authorities reported seven injuries among civilians, including a 59-year-old woman and her 8 and 11-year-old grandchildren.
The oblast fell under air alerts for all but 4.5 hours of the preceding day.
In Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, the local government reported continued attacks, particularly with FPV drones striking the Nikopol area. Russian attacks injured a 58-year-old man, but seemingly resulted in no deaths.
In Kharkiv Oblast, Russian attacks including several dozen drones damaged eight homes and apartment buildings throughout the oblast and injured an 80-year-old woman in the city of Kharkiv, Governor Oleh Syniehubov wrote on Telegram.
In Zaporizhzhia Oblast, Governor Ivan Fedorov reported 775 Russian strikes, which injured two civilians.
Russia has lost around 1,235,060 troops in Ukraine since the beginning of its full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, the General Staff of Ukraine's Armed Forces reported on Jan. 26.
The number includes 1,020 casualties that Russian forces suffered over the past day.
According to the report, Russia has also lost 11,608 tanks, 23,951 armored fighting vehicles, 75,906 vehicles and fuel tanks, 36,644 artillery systems, 1,626 multiple launch rocket systems, 1,286 air defense systems, 434 airplanes, 347 helicopters, 115б813 drones, 28 ships and boats, as well as two submarines.
Defense Industry Reporter
Kollen Post is the defense industry reporter at the Kyiv Independent. Based in Kyiv, he covers weapons production and defense tech. Originally from western Michigan, he speaks Russian and Ukrainian. His work has appeared in Radio Free Europe, Fortune, Breaking Defense, the Cipher Brief, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, FT's Sifted, and Science Magazine. He holds a BA from Vanderbilt University.
Pardons come as president and Republicans seem intent on investigating fraud in Democratic-run states
Donald Trump's mass pardoning of those convicted in connection to the January 6 insurrection raised eyebrows last year, but more recently his pardons have appeared to have a particular focus: to grant clemency to those convicted of fraud.
Since taking office, Trump has pardoned dozens of people convicted of white-collar crimes, including several billionaires, with most of the 13 pardons he quietly issued this month granting clemency to people convicted of fraud.
Those include Wanda Vázquez Garced, the former governor of Puerto Rico who pleaded guilty last year to a campaign finance violation. The US Department of Justice said Vázquez took hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from a Venezuelan, Julio Herrera Velutini, and Mark Rossini in exchange for firing a federal official investigating a bank owned by Herrera Velutini.
Trump pardoned Herrera Velutini and Rossini, who were both convicted of wire fraud, along with Vázquez. Herrera Velutini's daughter, Isabel Herrera, donated $2.5m to the pro-Trump political action committee Maga Inc, and another $1m in July 2025, CBS News reported. A White House official told CBS News the pardons and donations were unrelated.
Another pardon this month was given to a woman to whom Trump had granted clemency during his first term. Adriana Camberos had a fraud-related sentence commuted by Trump in 2021 after being convicted as part of an elaborate fake 5-hour Energy Drink scheme. In 2024, she and her brother were convicted in a separate fraud case which involved the pair lying to manufacturers to buy groceries at discount prices, before selling them at a profit.
More than half of Trump's 88 individual pardons – the bulk of those pardoned for the January 6 insurrection were pardoned in a sweeping presidential proclamation – were for white-collar offenses, “with money laundering, bank fraud and wire fraud among the most frequent crimes the president has wiped clean”, NBC News reported.
The network found that Trump had also pardoned more offenders who owed large fines or restitutions, either to the government or to victims. An analysis by Democrats on the House judiciary committee found that Trump's pardons have deprived “victims and survivors of crime” of $1.3bn in restitution and fines.
“Our analysis shows that Trump's criminal pardon spree is, in addition to everything else, an astonishing giveaway to lawbreakers to keep the money they stole from their employees, their investors, and all the American taxpayers. Whoever said crime doesn't pay has certainly not studied the Trump administration,” said Democrat Jamie Raskin, the ranking member of the House judiciary committee.
The fraud pardons come at a time when Republicans are, theoretically, laser-focused on investigating fraud. Federal prosecutors allege as much as $9bn has been stolen across Minnesota in schemes allegedly linked to the state's Somali population, and Trump has accused other Democratic-run states of fraud.
In early January, Trump used unproven allegations of widespread fraud to cut more than $10bn in childcare and social services payments from California, Illinois, New York, Minnesota and Colorado, each of which is run by Democrats. The effort has been blocked by two federal judges, allowing funds to continue to flow to states.
Earlier this month, Trump claimed he had begun a “fraud investigation of California”, without offering further information.
Yet it is hard to tally this apparent effort to root out fraud with Trump's treatment of other corruption cases. In June, the president commuted the sentence of Lawrence Duran, who was sentenced to 50 years in prison in 2011 for his role in a $200m Medicare fraud scheme.
The White House said in a statement: “When it comes to pardons, the White House takes them with the utmost seriousness and the president understands the responsibility that he has as president to issue pardons to individuals who are seeking that.”
It added: “That's why we have a very thorough review process here that moves with the Department of Justice and the White House counsel's office. There's a whole team of qualified lawyers who look at every single pardon request that ultimately make their way up to the president of the United States. He's the ultimate, final decision maker. And he was very clear when he came into office that he was most interested in looking at pardoning individuals who were abused and used by the Biden Department of Justice, and were over prosecuted by a weaponized DoJ.”
The contradiction has not gone unnoticed in the Democratic party. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California and a key Trump antagonist, this week launched a section of the governor's website that Newsom said would track “President Trump's pattern of pardoning convicted fraudsters and corrupt insiders”.
“Donald Trump is the personification of fraud. His hypocrisy knows no bounds: he is pardoning people convicted of fraud, corruption, and abusing the public trust – while turning around and using ‘fraud' as a launching pad to go after political rivals,” Newsom said in a statement.
“While his administration hands out get-out-of-jail-free cards to real fraudsters, the federal government is now trying to intimidate and target California with baseless allegations of ‘massive fraud'. The rule of law isn't a political weapon – it's a promise, and we won't let it be twisted to settle scores.”
President says his administration is reviewing fatal shooting as Republicans and Democrats criticize ICE surge
US politics live – latest updates
Donald Trump's efforts to deploy militarized immigration agents in US cities may finally be reaching a reckoning as he faces widespread opposition across the US, dissenting lawmakers in his own party, and impending court rulings after the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti by federal officers in Minneapolis.
Trump said on Monday that his administration was reviewing the shooting of Pretti in Minneapolis by a federal officer, and that he would send border czar Tom Homan to Minnesota.
“Tom is tough but fair, and will report directly to me,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on Monday. In the same post the president said Congress and the justice department were “looking” at Ilhan Omar, the Democratic Minnesota congresswoman who has been the target of much of Trump's ire in his recent crackdown on the state.
The Trump administration is contending with the fallout from the surge of federal immigration officers to Minnesota and the death of two American citizens in confrontations with federal agents. Lawsuits from state and local officials seeking an end to the federal surge will be heard on Monday in federal court, where a judge will consider a novel legal question: are the thousands of arrests, three shootings and two deaths in the surge so disruptive to civil order that it violates the 10th amendment rights of state sovereignty?
Trump told the Wall Street Journal in a short interview that immigration enforcement officers would leave the Minneapolis area “at some point”. The publication said Trump did not directly answer when asked twice whether the officer who shot Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse, had done the right thing.
In the same interview, Trump criticised Pretti for carrying a gun during protest activity. “I don't like any shooting. I don't like it,” Trump told the publication. “But I don't like it when somebody goes into a protest and he's got a very powerful, fully loaded gun with two magazines loaded up with bullets also. That doesn't play good either.”
The Trump administration is facing criticism from all sides over the shootings and upscaled enforcement. The NRA attacked the suggestion by a Trump-appointed federal prosecutor that armed protest creates “a high likelihood” that federal agents “will be legally justified” to shoot protesters. The Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, described comments from the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, the senior border patrol leader Greg Bovino and other officials about the shooting as “lies”.
Trump and Walz spoke on Monday morning, Trump wrote on Truth Social, offering conciliatory words about the governor after weeks of vitriol.
“It was a very good call, and we, actually, seemed to be on a similar wavelength,” Trump wrote. “I told Governor Walz that I would have Tom Homan call him, and that what we are looking for are any and all Criminals that they have in their possession. The Governor, very respectfully, understood that, and I will be speaking to him in the near future.”
Walz's office issued a statement that hinted at signs of a future de-escalation of the situation. It said the governor and the president had held a “productive” call where Trump “agreed to look into reducing the number of federal agents in Minnesota and working with the state in a more coordinated fashion on immigration enforcement regarding violent criminals”.
In Minneapolis, Pretti's death resonated with the thousands of people now helping with rapid response and community aid. Outrage over his killing drew some to protest, with a demonstration at a hotel overnight on Sunday bringing federal agents out of their rooms to shoot chemicals at protesters. A memorial for Pretti, filled with flowers, notes and candles, continues to grow on the site where he was gunned down.
The mark of the federal government's occupation can be seen and heard throughout Minneapolis and its suburbs. Signs and spray paint call for “ICE OUT”. After moments of silence for Pretti at sporting events this weekend, crowds chanted against US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Residents are not deterred by the violence, though they are shaken. They are still getting into their cars to follow and document ICE's activities, and gathering food and supplies to distribute to the families sheltering at home in fear of deportation.
“Perhaps they want to make an example out of us. Perhaps they're trying to break our spirit. Perhaps they're just dug in,” the Minneapolis city council member Aisha Chughtai told the Guardian on Sunday. “This is a city that has this long history of resistance and of standing up for ourselves and each other. I think we will weather this.”
The widespread outrage is registering in Washington as well, as a growing number of Republicans are pressing for a deeper investigation into federal immigration tactics in Minnesota after Pretti's fatal shooting – a sign that the Trump administration's accounting of events may face bipartisan scrutiny.
The Republican chair of the House homeland security committee, Andrew Garbarino, has sought testimony from leaders at ICE, Customs and Border Protection and US Citizenship and Immigration Services, saying “my top priority remains keeping Americans safe”, according to the Associated Press.
Other congressional Republicans have pressed for more information, including the Texas representative Michael McCaul and the senators Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Their statements, in addition to concern expressed from several Republican governors, reflects a party struggling with how to respond to federal agents' killing of Pretti.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) almost immediately alleged Pretti had “violently resisted” officers, saying they fired “defensive shots”. Video evidence contradicts that account. Trump also shared an image of the pistol allegedly found on Pretti in a Truth Social post, writing: “This is the gunman's gun, loaded (with two additional full magazines!) and ready to go.”
Pretti was reportedly legally permitted to carry a gun. Widely circulated video of his shooting death does not appear to depict him holding a gun; it does show an officer reaching to Pretti's lower back and stepping away with what appeared to be a pistol – and Pretti being subsequently shot to death.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former House Republican from Georgia, posted in support of law enforcement, but defended the right to legally carry firearms. “I unapologetically believe in border security and deporting criminal illegal aliens and I support law enforcement. However, I also unapologetically support the 2nd amendment,” Greene wrote. “Legally carrying a firearm is not the same as brandishing a firearm.
She added: “I support American's 1st and 4th amendment rights. There is nothing wrong with legally peacefully protesting and videoing.”
Democrats have vowed to withhold further funding from DHS unless a bill soon to come before the Senate is amended to include reforms that would restrict federal agents' actions in their deportation surge.
Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, said Democrats would not provide the necessary votes if DHS funding remained in the measure. A spokesperson for the Senate majority leader, John Thune, said DHS and other government funds would be voted on as a single package. Without a compromise, the government faces a partial shutdown at the end of January.
The Connecticut Democratic senator Chris Murphy told CNN's State of the Union that Democrats “can't vote to fund this lawless Department of Homeland Security … that is murdering American citizens, that is traumatizing little boys and girls all across the country, in violation of the law.”
Meanwhile, Homan has been the subject of controversy and is unlikely to de-escalate the situation in Minnesota. Undercover FBI agents recorded him accepting $50,000 in cash in 2024 in exchange for promising future government contract help. Trump's justice department closed the bribery investigation last year, citing insufficient evidence, which Democratic leaders have described as a cover-up.
The confrontation between the Trump administration and Minnesota's state government is shifting to a federal courtroom Monday in a case that could have significant legal and constitutional implications.
Minnesota's Attorney-General, Keith Ellison, is suing the Trump administration, arguing that its surge of immigration enforcement in the state has led to rights violations, including racial profiling. It will also argue that what it views as federal-government overreach violates constitutional limits on federal power.
David Schultz, a university professor of political science and legal studies at Hamline University in Minnesota, said the case may eventually make its way to the Supreme Court.
Both sides dig in as Trump's ICE crackdown on Minnesota shows no signs of letting up
“If the state of Minnesota were to win on this one, the implications would be enormous in terms of curtailing ICE activities and the curtailment of national power,” Prof. Schultz said.
“If the federal government were to win, I would say it puts states in a very precarious position, because they will be saying, ‘How do we protect ourselves?' Many would say it would render states somewhat powerless in these kinds of disputes.”
Reuters
It's one of a number of political conflicts between the two levels of government playing out in Minnesota, a state that has become the focal point in the Trump administration's effort to crack down on undocumented migrants.
On Saturday, a Border Patrol agent in Minneapolis shot and killed 37-year-old U.S. citizen Alex Pretti, an intensive-care nurse, in an altercation on the streets in Minneapolis. It's the second killing of a U.S. civilian by federal Department of Homeland Security agents this month, after the death of Renee Nicole Macklin Good on Jan. 7.
In both cases, federal officials have asserted authority over the investigation of the killings, leaving local officials frustrated and unable to access evidence. The DHS is blocking Minnesota's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension from investigating both deaths.
Minneapolis shooting victim Alex Pretti was an ICU nurse upset at Trump's immigration crackdowns, family say
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has called for ICE to leave the city and on Saturday he again asked President Donald Trump to withdraw the federal agents, who outnumber Minneapolis police by a ratio of about five to one.
The DHS has sent 3,000 immigration-enforcement officers to Minnesota, a deployment that has created chaos in Minneapolis as citizens have engaged in dozens of protests against the presence of masked, armed agents on their streets.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has also called for ICE to leave the state. On Sunday, Mr. Walz, in a public statement directed at Mr. Trump, asked, “What do we need to do to get these federal agents out of our state?”
People gather during a vigil held by healthcare workers at a memorial for Alex Pretti on Sunday in Minneapolis, Minn.Stephen Maturen/Getty Images
The Trump administration has argued that the street-level conflicts involving citizens and DHS agents in Minnesota have been created by state and local officials who have been unable to maintain order. Federal agents have made more than 3,000 arrests in Minnesota since the start of Operation Metro Surge in December, according to the White House.
Over the course of the recent upheaval, federal and state officials have both talked of involving the military for their purposes. On Saturday, Mr. Walz activated the state National Guard. Mr. Trump has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, and troops have been placed on standby for deployment to Minnesota.
Prof. Schultz said the federal government has the authority to enforce immigration laws, even if the state doesn't want them there. The principle of federal supremacy in the Constitution means that when there is a conflict between federal and state law, the federal government will prevail.
Left and right, Minnesotans look for a way out of chaos
However, the Tenth Amendment in the Bill of Rights says the federal government cannot coerce a state government into doing what it wants, Prof. Schultz said.
He said the Minnesota lawsuit will likely argue that the ICE deployment is effectively an attempt to compel Minnesota's co-operation in a federal action, and that it makes it impossible for local officials to carry out basic law-enforcement functions, such as keeping the peace.
The state will be seeking a temporary restraining order to stop the current ICE mobilization, Prof. Schultz added.
What's unusual, he said, is that typically the federal government is the branch that steps in to protect individual rights, as it did in the civil-rights era when Southern states tried, unsuccessfully, to assert a state-level right to resist desegregation.
“It's a political and constitutional battle over how far the national government can go to compel states to take a particular ideological line when it comes to federal policy,” Prof. Schultz said.
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Guillaume Chevasson, CEO of Airbus operations in Quebec, on a walkway above one of the production floors at Airbus Canada Limited Partnership in Mirabel, Que., on Jan. 16.ROGER LEMOYNE/The Globe and Mail
Airbus SE's EADSY new top executive in Canada says the European plane maker has no regrets about taking over Bombardier Inc.'s BBD-B-T C Series jet program despite its continuing challenges and will push to make it profitable as the company weighs when to move ahead with a larger version of the aircraft.
Guillaume Chevasson started as chief executive of Airbus Canada Limited Partnership and head of the A220 program, formerly the C Series, this past October. He leads roughly 5,000 Airbus employees in the country and says he's optimistic about the jetliner as well as the company's business prospects as the Carney government ramps up defence spending.
“Airbus took over the C Series in 2018 and today, it's become an essential and strategic product in the Airbus family,” Mr. Chevasson said in a recent interview.
“There is no debate. There is no doubt” inside the company about whether the takeover was worthwhile, he said.
The executive's bullishness reflects the progress made to date on sales and production flow since Bombardier relinquished ownership of the aircraft, prized for its fuel efficiency and technological prowess.
Quebec again writes down value of Airbus partnership
But significant obstacles remain, namely achieving a manufacturing cadence that delivers a return for Airbus and the Quebec government – its partner in the venture.
Airbus has said it needs to produce 14 A220 jetliners a month at its facilities in Mirabel and Mobile, Ala., for the program to break even.
That threshold has proven elusive: Less than a month after Mr. Chevasson stepped in the door as Canada CEO, the plane maker stated that it wouldn't achieve that level in 2026 as previously planned. The new target is now to stabilize output at 12 jets per month this year from the current seven or eight, with no specific timeline for the 14 level.
The European company has struggled with supplier and labour issues, blaming bottlenecks in airframe components and cabin materials for the delays in getting aircraft into its customers' hands.
It has also been working to lower the costs of parts for the jet, which were high originally because suppliers demanded more compensation for what was a higher-risk product under Bombardier.
Airbus planes are built in the Mirabel plant.ROGER LEMOYNE/The Globe and Mail
The A220's geared turbofan engines have been another major problem. Pratt & Whitney, the manufacturer, disclosed in 2023 a major and widespread defect in the motors because of what it said was contaminated powder metal used in production.
A number of airlines have grounded their A220 jets as Pratt worked through a fix and at least one, Egyptair, sold off its A220 fleet entirely. Air Baltic, an early A220 customer, cancelled 4,670 flights last summer as a result of what it said was Pratt's “inability to meet its timely maintenance obligations” for the engines.
As of last October, nearly 80 A220 jets, or about 18 per cent of the global fleet, was parked or inactive, according to aerospace trade publication Leeham News, though Pratt says the engine issues are related to only 32 of those planes. The engine maker has hatched a solution that is gradually being swapped into all A220s in service while newly built A220s are now being fitted with upgraded engines, Airbus officials say.
Still, analysts say the trouble has dented the trust airlines had in the aircraft and, more particularly, in the capacity of Pratt & Whitney to offer engine support. Airbus tallied orders for 49 A220s last year and only 17 the year before.
“The problem is once you get in the queue for the fix, it could be a three to four months waiting process to get in and then a three to four month process to do the overhaul,” said Ernie Arvai of U.S. aerospace consultancy AirInsight. “That's a long time to keep an airplane on the ground.”
Airbus Canada Limited Partnership in Mirabel.ROGER LEMOYNE/The Globe and Mail
Back in Mirabel, the opening of a dedicated subassembly area in 2022 in a hangar formerly used for Bombardier CRJ jets has improved production flow. Airbus's takeover last month of the A220 work packages previously done by struggling Spirit AeroSystems Holdings in Belfast should also help, bringing manufacturing of the aircraft's composite wings and other pieces in-house.
Airbus simply needs more time to digest the Spirit operations and work through the introduction of the optimized engine with Pratt & Whitney, which has complicated the A220 production ramp up, Mr. Chevasson said.
All the tools are in hand now to boost the production rate further while the corrections to in-service aircraft should be mostly done by the end of this year, he said.
Still, analysts say the aircraft needs more sales to cement its viability. As of the end of December, the jet maker has struck deals for 949 A220s from 32 different customers, including major carriers like Delta Airlines, Jet Blue and Air Lease Corp. It has a backlog of 467 jets ordered but not yet delivered, which is about five years of work at current rates.
Some airlines such as U.S. budget carrier Breeze and Air France are keen on Airbus offering a stretched version of the A220 that would seat up to 180 passengers. Mr. Chevasson said Airbus is working on exactly that but that a final decision to move ahead hasn't been made.
Mr. Chevasson walks to a production area with employee Maxime Trembaly at the Mirabel facility.ROGER LEMOYNE/The Globe and Mail
Quebec, which had invested US$1-billion in the plane program to help Bombardier avoid financial collapse, held a 16-per-cent stake when Airbus took control and later boosted its share to 25 per cent, while Airbus owns the other 75 per cent. The province has since written off the initial US$1-billion investment and, last fall, reduced by half the estimated value of its current stake in the limited partnership, pegging it at US$300-million.
“It's a legitimate question to ask whether Quebec will recoup the money,” said Mehran Ebrahimi, an aerospace specialist at the University of Quebec at Montreal. “But we shouldn't only look at it through an accountant's lens.”
Airbus's expansion in Quebec has created 2,000 new jobs and bolstered the wider aerospace cluster as the giant's work practices and know-how filters down to smaller manufacturers, Mr. Ebrahimi said. All those elements have “paid off and they'll continue to pay off” for years to come, he said.
Mr. Chevasson, a native of Toulouse, France, with two young kids, says he's looking forward to building a life in Quebec, cold and all.
“What Airbus has here in Mirabel is fairly unique” outside Europe, Mr. Chevasson said. “We can build, develop, support and flight test an aircraft. That's unique. We've got big decisions that are coming potentially and investments. … There's more work to do.”
ROGER LEMOYNE/The Globe and Mail
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By Kohei Masuda and Kenneth Valencich / Japan News Staff Writers
16:02 JST, January 26, 2026
PokéPark KANTO's official opening is just around the corner on Feb. 5, and a media preview event on Monday showed off what there is to see. Visitors can meet more than 600 Pokémon at the facility located inside Yomiuriland, which straddles Inagi, Tokyo, and Kawasaki.
Covering about 2.6 hectares, PokéPark KANTO is divided into two main zones that make the most of its lush setting in the Tama Hills: Pokémon Forest, a wooded area built for exploration; and Sedge Town, a lively hub where visitors can shop, dine and enjoy attractions.
In Pokémon Forest, visitors can stroll along an around 500-meter route and find hordes of Pokémon. Among them, the slug-like dragon Goomy, with their beady little eyes, have massive smiles for all who approach.
Sedge Town is filled with shops and two permanent attractions: Vee Vee Voyage, a carousel that sends guests on a gentle journey alongside Eevee and friends; and Pika Pika Paradise, a ride powered by electric-type Pokémon including Pikachu and Emolga.
Pokémon danced to exciting music in the Pikachu and Eevee Bubble Carnival parade while bubbles filled with fog fluttered in every direction.
PokéPark KANTO also has a large shop called Pokémon Daisuki Shop, where visitors can pick up original merchandise including plush toys and other exclusives.
■ PokéPark KANTO official website https://www.pokepark-kanto.co.jp/teaser/en_US/
©Pokémon. ©Nintendo/Creatures Inc./GAME FREAK inc.TM, ®, and character names are trademarks of Nintendo.
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Alex Pretti's weapon may have been fired accidentally by immigration officer running from scene
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The fatal shooting of a nurse by ICE agents may have been prompted by one of the officers “negligently” firing the victim's gun, it has emerged.
Video footage shows Alex Pretti's gun being taken from him by a border agent as he lies on the ground while being beaten by other officers.
As the agent runs away with Pretti's 9mm pistol in his right hand, a gunshot can be heard in the footage posted online.
That, in turn, may have “spooked” the other Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents at the scene into firing a number of rounds at Pretti, 37, as he lay unarmed and defenceless on the ground.
The series of events raises serious questions about the training and discipline of the 3,000 federal agents who have been drafted into Minnesota by the Trump administration to round up illegal immigrants in the state.
Minneapolis police have already been blocked from the investigation into Pretti's death and senior figures within the administration have labelled the intensive care nurse a “terrorist”, claiming that the federal agents who shot him were the actual victims.
Amid growing alarm that any inquiry by the FBI and Justice Department would vindicate the ICE agents and place blame on Pretti for him causing his own death, analysis of the video footage has cast doubt on the White House's version of events.
Opponents say the footage shows Pretti, who was by then disarmed, being “executed” in the street.
Brian O'Hara, the police chief in Minneapolis, said on Sunday that the 37-year-old was lawfully entitled to have a handgun under the state's concealed carry laws.
Rob Doar, a lawyer and the president of the Minnesota Gun Owners Law Centre, said he believed that the initial shot was fired by the agent who had seized Pretti's gun.
“After analysing the videos, I believe it's highly likely the first shot was a negligent discharge from the agent in the grey jacket after he removed the Sig P320 from Pretti's holster while exiting the scene,” Mr Doar said.
The initial shot triggered a number of rounds being fired at Pretti, even though he was unarmed at the time.
A 2025 study showed that police officers were 11 times more likely to fire their weapons if they had already heard gunfire as part of a phenomenon called “contagious fire”.
Critics will argue that the number of shots fired at Pretti suggests that ICE agents deployed in Minneapolis were not trained to tackle crowd control in city environments.
Tim Walz, the state governor, has demanded that Donald Trump withdraw the “3,000 untrained agents” from Minnesota “before they kill another American in the street”.
In a telephone interview with The Wall Street Journal on Sunday night, Mr Trump avoided questions about whether the officer who shot Pretti had done the “right thing”.
“We're looking, we're reviewing everything and will come out with a determination,” the US president said.
He also signalled the potential withdrawal of ICE agents from Minneapolis, but did not offer a time frame for their departure.
“At some point we will leave. We've done, they've done a phenomenal job,” he said.
Pretti's death followed the fatal shooting of Renee Good, a mother of three, by an ICE agent just over two weeks ago.
The Sig Sauer 9mm pistol legally owned by Pretti has come under scrutiny in recent years over reports of an alleged defect that has allowed it to be fired “uncommanded”.
More than 100 lawsuits have been lodged against the manufacturers over claims of unintentional discharges.
According to reports, ICE banned its agents from using the weapon last summer, with the agency issuing an order to replace the Sig pistol with another made by Glock.
Sig Sauer denied any problems with the popular handgun. In a statement, the company accused “uninformed, agenda-driven parties” of launching “attacks against Sig Sauer's most tested, most reliable, and most durable product – the P320 pistol”.
It added: “This misinformation causes confusion and uncertainty among our valued customers.” The P320 cannot “under any circumstances discharge without a trigger pull”, it said.
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Pressure is mounting on the Trump administration to investigate Pretti's death properly amid fears it will be covered up.
Barack Obama, the former US president, said on Sunday that ICE and border patrol agents were “acting with impunity and engaging in tactics that seem designed to intimidate, harass, provoke and endanger the residents of a major American city”.
He accused Mr Trump of being “eager to escalate the situation” rather than “impose some semblance of discipline and accountability over the agents they've deployed”.
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A federal appeals court on Jan. 23 denied the Justice Department's (DOJ's) request to arrest more individuals involved in an anti-ICE protest that occurred inside a church in Minnesota earlier this month.
MOSCOW, January 26. /TASS/. Kiev has lost 60% of the personnel of assault groups from the Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry and the Ukrainian military in the forest near Siminovka in the Kharkov region, Russian security structures told TASS.
"On the Kharkov direction, in the forest southwest of Siminovka, the Ukrainian military deployed units and conducted two counterattacks. During the repulsion of these attacks, 60% of the personnel of the assault groups were destroyed," the agency's source said.
On January 23, the Russian defense ministry reported that Battlegroup North units gained control of the settlement of Siminovka in the Kharkov Region through active offensive operations in the Kharkov direction.
For nearly two months, Minnesota has been the target of the largest operation of U.S. President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown, with 3,000 federal agents flooding the state and arresting at least 3,000 people for deportation.
Since Jan. 7, it has been the site of the most furious and sustained resistance to Mr. Trump of his second term so far, after Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer Jonathan Ross gunned down Renee Nicole Macklin Good, a mother of three, near a spontaneous anti-ICE protest on a snowy Minneapolis street.
And this weekend in the city, a Border Patrol agent shot to death Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse – like Ms. Good, a U.S. citizen – touching off a protest as angry crowds confronted federal officers, who opened fire with pepper balls and tear gas.
Now, both sides are digging in.
Kristi Noem, Mr. Trump's Secretary of Homeland Security, is accusing Mr. Pretti of “domestic terrorism,” despite video that shows him doing nothing more than recording officers on his phone before they tackled him. At the spot where he died, meanwhile, protesters said his death had only steeled their resolve to keep fighting until federal forces leave.
“It's a war zone here,” Nicole Wehr, a 50-year-old social worker, told The Globe and Mail on Sunday as she stood next to a sidewalk memorial for Mr. Pretti. “To President Trump and his three-ring circus: Stop killing us, get out, stay away from us.”
Federal officers shot and killed a man in Minneapolis amid the Trump administration's immigration crackdown, according to a hospital record obtained by the Associated Press. Minneapolis Gov. Tim Walz said in a social media post that he had been in contact with the White House after the shooting.
The Associated Press
It all means that the clashes in this Midwestern state of 5.8 million may be about to intensify, even as the struggle extends to Washington, where Democratic legislators threatened to partially shut down the government to cut off funds to Mr. Trump's immigration sweeps.
Mr. Pretti was killed shortly after 9 a.m. Saturday on Nicollet Avenue, a commercial street south of downtown Minneapolis. Videos from the scene show people blaring car horns, shouting and blowing whistles, tactics employed to alert residents to the presence of federal officers in a neighbourhood.
Mr. Pretti, who worked in the intensive care unit of a hospital for war veterans, appeared to be videoing agents with his phone. When he intervened to help a woman who had been shoved to the ground by an agent, the agent pepper sprayed him, then at least six other agents rushed in and the group wrestled Mr. Pretti down.
After one agent emerged from the scrum with what appeared to be a gun, another agent shot Mr. Pretti and continued firing as he lay immobile on the ground.
In the hours that followed, thousands of people converged on the intersection. Officers used gas and batons in a bid to disperse them, while protesters dragged dumpsters, trash cans and pieces of plywood into the street to create a makeshift barricade.
Man killed by federal officer in Minneapolis was an ICU nurse, family says
Throughout the weekend, a parade of Trump administration officials characterized Mr. Pretti as violent without presenting any evidence. Officials released a photograph of a pistol they said was taken from Mr. Pretti, who had a licence to legally carry one. The videos do not show Mr. Pretti holding the gun when police took him down.
Ms. Noem said at a Washington news conference that Mr. Pretti was engaged in “domestic terrorism.” Stephen Miller, the immigration hard-liner and top adviser to Mr. Trump, called him “an assassin” on social media.
In cable news interviews on Sunday, Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino said his agents were “the victims” and FBI Director Kash Patel doubled down: “You do not get to attack law enforcement officials in this country without any repercussions.”
By Sunday morning, the scene was calm as hundreds of protesters came and went in -20C weather. An icy snowbank had become a shrine to Mr. Pretti, with pine boughs, flowers and votive candles surrounding a wooden cross.
A mourner visits a makeshift memorial in the area where Alex Pretti was shot dead a day earlier by a federal immigration agent in Minneapolis on Sunday.OCTAVIO JONES/AFP/Getty Images
Lucy Kail, 23, sank to her knees and cried in front of the tribute. “People need to see this. People need to know it's real. It's senseless and it's unneeded and we're begging for it to stop,” she said of the federal clampdown.
Ms. Wehr, the social worker, recounted her own experience with ICE. Shortly after Ms. Good's killing, she said, agents went from door to door in her northern Minneapolis neighbourhood, asking if they could come inside.
The officers asked questions about Ms. Wehr's neighbours, she said, and appeared to be soliciting information about whether anyone in the area was undocumented. She sent them away. “We all deserve to be here. This country was founded on immigration,” she said.
Outside the Whipple Federal Building, a concrete fortress between the airport and an expressway, a group of protesters kept up a 24-hour vigil. The building houses detention facilities where people rounded up in immigration sweeps are held. It is also the base of operations for ICE and Border Patrol agents deployed to the city.
As unmarked cars, pickup trucks and vans drove in and out, several dozen people behind a security fence jeered at them.
A family member reacts after a federal immigration officer used a battering ram to break down a door before making an arrest on Jan. 11, in Minneapolis.John Locher/The Associated Press
Kelly Callaway, a 56-year-old who works in the non-profit sector, said the weekend's violence would motivate people to redouble their efforts. “We have to stand up for each other. I will not stop so long as they're here,” she said, gesturing to federal agents across the street.
Ms. Callaway is among the networks of people who roam the city, looking for ICE patrols. On one occasion earlier this month, she said, she saw agents stop a man on the street in the suburb of Columbia Heights. About 25 neighbours came out of their houses and surrounded the officers, who left.
On Sunday, she said, she planned to surveil “hot spots” for agents. “If we don't stop this here, it's coming for everyone in the United States.”
Later in the afternoon, thousands gathered for a march through the downtown business district. In the evening, a smaller group of demonstrators converged on a hotel in nearby Saint Paul, where they believed ICE agents were staying. The protesters barricaded the street with recycling bins and pallets, then banged pots and pans and turned on a siren, in a bid to disrupt officers' sleep. They were prevented from entering the lobby by security.
After about three hours, Border Patrol agents fired tear gas, made arrests and cleared the street.
Mr. Trump took aim at Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, both Democrats, demanding they help him carry out his deportation campaign.
“Democrat run Sanctuary Cities and States are REFUSING to co-operate with ICE, and they are actually encouraging Leftwing Agitators to unlawfully obstruct their operations,” he wrote on Truth Social on Sunday.
Mr. Walz said it was Mr. Trump who was trying to provoke unrest.
“If fear, violence and chaos is what you wanted from us, then you clearly underestimated the people of this state and nation,” he told a news conference. “We are tired, but we're resolved. We're peaceful, but we'll never forget.”
The President ordered the Minnesota crackdown, dubbed Operation Metro Surge, after dozens of members of the city's Somali community were charged in connection with a welfare fraud scheme. Mr. Trump has long fixated on the state, particularly Somali-American Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a firebrand leftist, and Mr. Walz, the 2024 Democratic nominee for vice-president.
Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer threatened to block a funding bill that includes money for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), a move that could partially shut down the federal government at the end of the month. “What's happening in Minnesota is appalling – and unacceptable in any American city,” he said in a statement.
Jacky Rosen, a moderate Democratic senator from swing-state Nevada, called for Ms. Noem's impeachment. “The abuses of power we're seeing from ICE are the latest proof that she has lost control over her own department and staff,” Ms. Rosen said in a statement.
Alex J. Pretti, the man who was shot by federal officers in Minneapolis on Saturday, in an undated photo provided by Michael Pretti.Uncredited/The Associated Press
Even Mr. Trump's own Republican caucus began to fracture, with senators Thom Tillis and Bill Cassidy calling for a full investigation of Mr. Pretti's shooting, with state involvement. So far, Minnesota officials have said federal authorities have blocked them from accessing evidence.
In a statement, Mr. Cassidy warned that the “credibility of ICE and DHS are at stake” absent an independent investigation.
Mr. Pretti's parents decried the “sickening lies” the Trump administration was telling about their son, pointing out that he was not holding a gun in the videos of his shooting.
“We are heartbroken but also very angry. Alex was a kind-hearted soul who cared deeply for his family and friends and also the American veterans whom he cared for,” Michael and Susan Pretti said in a statement. “Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man.”
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Sunday that a U.S. document laying out security guarantees for Ukraine is “100 percent ready,” and is only waiting for a time and a place to be signed.
“For us, security guarantees are first and foremost guarantees of security from the United States. The document is 100 percent ready, and we are waiting for our partners to confirm the date and place when we will sign it,” Zelenskyy said at a news conference during a visit to Vilnius, Lithuania.
MOSCOW, January 26. /TASS/. Russia will be able to ensure its security even in the absence of the Treaty between Russia and the United States on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (the New START Treaty), TASS by Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov told TASS in an interview.
The senior diplomat was asked what will come after New START. "Nothing," he said. "Nothing, in the sense that there will be nothing to replace it. And nothing, in the sense that our security will still be guaranteed," he responded to a clarifying question about whether Russia plans to take actions in connection with the treaty's expiration.
"Even in the absence of the treaty, which, by the way, we suspended due to the dramatic worsening of Washington's policy toward Russia," Ryabkov assured. "As well as serious deviations by the US side from the treaty's requirements, which we have repeatedly spoken about even with the administration of [former US Democratic President Joe] Biden."
The document expires on February 5, 2026.
Putin announced at a Russian Security Council meeting on September 22, 2025 that Moscow was ready to maintain compliance with the quantitative restrictions outlined in the treaty for another year after the document expires in February 2026. However, he stressed that the measure would be valid only if Washington did the same.
US President Donald Trump said in response to a TASS question on October 5, 2025 that the Russian leader's proposal was "a good idea." However, there has been no official reaction from Washington to Moscow's proposal as of yet.
Live Updates
• Trump-Walz call: President Donald Trump struck a notable shift in tone after a call with Gov. Tim Walz, saying they're “on a similar wavelength.” Walz said Trump agreed to consider reducing the number of federal agents in Minnesota.
• Border czar to Minnesota: Trump earlier said he is sending Tom Homan to the state, following the fatal shooting of ICU nurse Alex Pretti in an encounter Saturday with federal agents.
• Few details back claims: Federal officials have declined to provide critical details substantiating their claim an agent shot Pretti in self-defense. Read CNN's fact check and watch analysis of videos from several angles.
• In court today: A judge heard arguments on whether to temporarily halt the immigration crackdown in Minnesota. Separately, a federal court hearing is set for today after a judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking federal agencies from destroying or altering evidence related to Pretti's killing.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the administration could pull back on the deployment of US Customs and Border Protection in Minnesota if state officials cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on the ground.
President Donald Trump has called for more cooperation from Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, including that they “turn over” all undocumented immigrants incarcerated in the state to federal authorities.
“If Gov. Walz and Mayor Frey implement these commonsense cooperative measures, CBP will no longer be needed to support ICE on the ground in Minnesota,” Leavitt said during today's White House press briefing.
“ICE and local law enforcement will peacefully work together as they are effectively doing in so many other states and jurisdictions to remove violent criminals from American neighborhoods across the country,” she added.
Remember: A surge of federal immigration officers in Minnesota has left the Midwestern state on edge for weeks, with Saturday's fatal shooting of Alex Pretti in an encounter with Border Patrol officers marking the second time a US citizen has been fatally shot by federal law enforcement this month. Border Patrol is an agency within Customs and Border Protection.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called President Donald Trump a strong supporter of Americans' Second Amendment rights, days after Trump and other officials questioned why Alex Pretti was carrying a firearm prior to being fatally shot by federal agents.
“There has been no greater supporter or defender of the right to bear arms than President Donald J. Trump,” she said during a White House press briefing.
Still, Leavitt qualified her statement by cautioning that “Americans do not have a right to impede lawful immigration enforcement operations,” and blamed Pretti for inviting the altercation that led to his death.
“Any gun owner knows that when you are carrying a weapon, when you are bearing arms, and you are confronted by law enforcement, you are raising the assumption of risk and the risk of force being used against you,” Leavitt said. “And again, that's unfortunately what took place on Saturday.”
Trump in a Truth Social post over the weekend questioned why Pretti had been carrying a gun and additional magazines. FBI Director Kash Patel also sought to shift blame on Sunday, saying in an interview that “you cannot bring a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest.”
Tom Homan, the White House border czar, will now be the “main point of contact on the ground in Minneapolis,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.
Trump said today he is sending Tom Homan to Minnesota this evening, following Saturday's fatal shooting of Alex Pretti.
Meanwhile, top Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino will “continue to lead” the agency nationwide, Leavitt said.
Bovino's heavy-handed enforcement style has been supported by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem but has also drawn criticism. He has been seen in Minneapolis amid heightened tensions in recent weeks.
The White House is tamping down any appearance of conflict between Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and border czar Tom Homan, as CNN reports they have at times been at odds. US officials told CNN the two have generally not spoken to each other in recent months.
“Mr. Homan is doing an exceptional job and he has been working with Secretary Noem and President Trump over the course of the last year. ” Leavitt said during a press briefing.
“Secretary Noem is also in charge of FEMA and we're in the wake of a brutal winter storm where hundreds of thousands of Americans have been impacted by that. Border czar Homan is in a unique position to drop everything and go to Minnesota to continue having productive conversations with state and local officials,” Leavitt added.
Leavitt also reiterated numerous times in Monday's briefing that the president still has “confidence and trust” in Noem.
Some context: President Donald Trump's announcement Monday morning that Homan is being dispatched to Minneapolis suggested a potential sidelining of the heavy-handed tactics used by top Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino and underscored the internal dispute within the administration over executing the president's immigration agenda.
The move has been met with relief from some Homeland Security officials who have been waiting for Homan to weigh in, given his vast experience in federal law enforcement.
CNN's Priscilla Alvarez contributed.
A two-hour hearing in a federal courtroom in Minneapolis ended today with no immediate decision from a judge on whether to order the Trump administration to suspend Operation Metro Surge.
Judge Katherine Menendez did not say when she will rule on the request from the state and the Twin Cities, but assured the attorneys, “If I had a burner in front of the front burner, this would be on it.”
Attorneys for the state of Minnesota argued statements made by President Donald Trump and US Attorney General Pam Bondi showed the surge of agents into the Minneapolis area was intended to “stir the pot” and coerce the state to adopt Trump-approved policies on immigration rather than achieve a law enforcement objective.
An attorney for the federal government said the surge was connected to those policies because the state's lack of cooperation forced federal officials to take immigration enforcement in Minnesota into their own hands, using the president's constitutional authority.
“I think it kind of goes without saying that we are in shockingly unusual times,” Menendez said.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said she has not heard President Donald Trump commit to releasing the federal agents' body camera footage from the fatal shooting of ICU nurse Alex Pretti in Minnesota.
“That's not something I've heard the president commit to, so I won't do that from the podium,” she said today in a press briefing at the White House.
Leavitt was asked by CNN's Alayna Treene whether ICE agents should wear body cameras so the footage could be used to settle disputed accounts of activity on the ground.
“Well, that's a policy question that I know the policy folks in the building are having with members on Capitol Hill, and I'll leave it to them and the president to make that decision,” Leavitt said.
Some context: CNN was first to report that at least two officers involved in the Saturday incident were wearing body cameras, which are part of the internal review.
Federal agencies like ICE aren't required to wear body cameras, thanks to a 2025 executive order by Trump rescinding a Biden-era policy. Agents have relied on phone cameras to record during tense situations, a practice that has come under scrutiny, as CNN has reported.
This post has been updated with additional information.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said President Donald Trump has not characterized Alex Pretti as a “domestic terrorist,” despite claims made by members of his administration.
“I have not heard the president characterize Mr. Pretti in that way. However, I have heard the president say he wants to let the facts and the investigation lead itself,” Leavitt said during a White House press briefing.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller have both likened Pretti, who as fatally shot in an encounter Saturday with federal agents, to a domestic terrorist.
When pushed again on claims from the administration and whether Miller will apologize for his comments against Pretti, Leavitt said the investigation is underway.
“Nobody here at the White House, including the president of the United States, wants to see Americans hurt or killed and losing their lives in American streets,” Leavitt said.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt avoided answering when asked why Trump administration officials rushed to issue unfounded claims in the hours after Alex Pretti was shot and before an investigation had taken place.
“Well, look, this has obviously been a very fluid and fast-moving situation throughout the weekend,” Leavitt told reporters during a White House news briefing.
Leavitt distinguished President Donald Trump's mindset on the shooting from statements made by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and top White House aide Stephen Miller, who called Pretti a “domestic terrorist.”
“As for President Trump, whom I speak for, he has said that he wants to let the investigation continue and let the facts lead in this case,” Leavitt said.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted Monday that the Trump administration believes its mass deportation operation remains broadly popular with Americans, despite the intensifying blowback over the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
“Americans overwhelmingly want exactly what President Trump is delivering: strong borders and strict immigration enforcement against the worst illegal aliens,” she said during a White House press briefing, adding that “polling shows huge support for this exact thing.”
Leavitt's defense of the administration's approach came two days after a federal agent fatally shot Pretti, prompting calls from both sides of the aisle for officials to reevaluate their enforcement presence in Minneapolis.
The administration's aggressive tactics in Minnesota and other states over the last several months have weighed on voters' views of President Donald Trump's immigration policy, according to a range of polling, including rising disapproval of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's tactics even among those who support Trump's handling of the southern border.
Leavitt on Monday blamed state and local officials for failing to help with the deportation efforts, vowing that Trump “will never back down from his promise to deport violent criminal illegal aliens.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the FBI and Department of Homeland Security are actively conducting investigations into the shooting of Alex Pretti.
Saturday's shooting remains under active investigation by Homeland Security Investigations and the FBI, Leavitt said, and Customs and Border Protection is also conducting its own internal review.
“As President Trump said yesterday, the administration is reviewing everything with respect to the shooting, and we will let that investigation play out,” Leavitt said.
However, top Cabinet and White House officials on Saturday have mad declarative statements about Pretti, including White House chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller, who called him a “domestic terrorist.”
Leavitt added: “Nobody in the White House, including President Trump, wants to see people getting hurt or killed in America's streets. This includes Renee Good, Alex Pretti, the brave men and women of federal law enforcement and the many Americans who have been victimized at the hands of illegal alien criminals.”
Investigators have interviewed the immigration agents involved in Saturday's shooting of Alex Pretti, according to a federal law enforcement source.
Investigators are also reviewing footage from several officers involved in the incident that led to the fatal shooting, a senior Department of Homeland Security official said Monday.
CNN was first to report that at least two officers involved in the incident were wearing body cameras, which are part of the internal review.
The investigation is being led by the Department's Homeland Security Investigations agency, while local officials in Minnesota are conducting their own independent investigation.
The footage could be a key part of both investigations, given the close range of the shooting, which was also recorded by bystanders.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt blamed elected Democrats for the “tragedy” in Minnesota, specifically calling out Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey.
The comments came shortly after President Donald Trump wrote on social media that he had a “very good call” with Walz, saying they're “on a similar wavelength.”
“This tragedy occurred as a result of a deliberate and hostile resistance by Democrat leaders in Minnesota,” Leavitt said during Monday's press briefing. “For weeks, Gov. Walz and the mayor, Jacob Frey, and other elected Democrats were spreading lies about federal law enforcement officers who are risking their lives daily to remove the worst criminal illegal aliens from our streets.”
More on the call: Walz called his conservation with the president “productive” and said Trump agreed to consider reducing the number of federal agents in Minnesota.
Ahead of Friday's government funding deadline, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is demanding Senate Majority Leader John Thune separate the Department of Homeland Security funding bill from the other five appropriations bills in the package.
In a statement, Schumer said, “If Leader Thune puts those five bills on the floor this week, we can pass them right away. If not, Republicans will again be responsible for another government shutdown.”
All 100 senators would have to agree to separate the DHS funding bill, which includes funding for ICE, from the rest of the package. If even one senator objects, then that portion will remain in the package, setting the stage for a partial government shutdown.
As she decides how to respond to a request from the state of Minnesota to order an end to Operation Metro Surge, a federal judge expressed skepticism over whether the operation is really addressing law enforcement concerns.
“No disrespect, but you all named it. You all declared it. You said when it started,” US District Court Judge Katherine Menendez said during a court hearing in Minnesota on the matter today. “Presumably since you created it, you understand its scope.”
The judge's frustration came after a Department of Justice attorney was unable to say how many officers have been deployed to the Twin Cities under Operation Metro Surge. Menendez said some administration demands — such as requiring jails to turn over immigration suspects to ICE — don't seem to be fixed by sending in thousands of agents.
“Hundreds and hundreds of people being arrested (in the surge) have never been in jail, so that change wouldn't have changed anything,” Menendez said.
Administration attorney Brantley Mayers said the state cannot claim the 10th Amendment allows it to both avoid cooperation with federal immigration and prevent the federal government from sending more agents to do work the state refuses to do.
“If they change their policy tomorrow, one of the goals of the surge would have been accomplished,” Mayers said.
Menendez said at the conclusion of the hearing that she was not immediately prepared to rule on the request, which she acknowledged presented many difficult legal questions.
“Here we have executive action that isn't on paper; it's in the street,” Menendez said. “But that can't put it beyond the reach of consideration.”
Today's hearing related to a lawsuit in which Minnesota and the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul seek an end to Operation Metro Surge, the federal government's influx of immigration officers into the Minneapolis area. The plaintiffs first want an order that would temporarily halt the operation while the suit plays out.
Republican lawmakers are privately expressing relief that border czar Tom Homan will be taking over leadership of the immigration operations in Minnesota, sources told CNN.
“He knows what he's doing. He gets it,” one Republican lawmaker told CNN, saying Homan understands the system and how to do enforcement operations the “correct way.”
Homan is longtime border official with decades of law enforcement experience. While Homan has pushed for some of the Trump administration's most controversial immigration-related policies, allies and advisers view him as being “a grown-up,” one source said.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune publicly praised the president's decision Monday, calling Homan's assignment a “positive development.”
“This is a positive development — one that I hope leads to turning down the temperature and restoring order in Minnesota,” the Republican leader wrote on X. “I encourage local officials in Minnesota to work with the administration to keep communities safe and continue the important work of enforcing our laws and getting dangerous criminals off of America's streets.”
Lawmakers have been stressing to the White House for weeks the importance of getting the messaging right on immigration, two sources told CNN. The sources stressed they still support Trump's immigration crackdown and believe the country does too, but they felt the White House was not articulating a thought-out plan to the public.
On the shooting of Alex Pretti in Minnesota over the weekend, Republican allies and advisers told CNN no one should be getting ahead of an investigation.
“I think everyone wants a transparent and independent investigation,” one lawmaker said. “It seems the White House is getting that message, or at least I hope they are.”
This post has been updated with additional reaction.
Two Italian journalists for state broadcaster RAI posted video of an altercation they had with ICE agents while reporting in Minneapolis over the weekend.
Journalist Laura Cappon and filmmaker Daniele Babbo were riding alongside activists who were following ICE vehicles, when their own car was surrounded by ICE vehicles, according to the video posted on social media for RAI's “In Mezz'Ora” program.
In the video, the driver, who identified herself as Rachel Thunder, can be heard telling someone a description of the ICE vehicle she and the journalists were following.
“We're not doing anything wrong,” Thunder says to the passengers in the car. “We haven't broken any laws.”
Cappon can then be heard speaking in Italian saying there is one ICE vehicle in front of them and another behind them. “They're trapping us,” she says in English. “So we are trapped.”
In the video, an ICE agent can be seen approaching the vehicle, and Thunder can be heard telling the officers, “I'm not doing anything wrong, I'm just driving around my community.” Cappon repeatedly says, “Press, we are press,” during the altercation.
The officer then says, “This is the only warning. If you keep following us from this point on, you are on camera right now, we will break your window and we will pull you out of the vehicle.”
The incident has caused backlash in Italy, with opposition leaders calling on Italian Prime Minsiter Giorgia Meloni and Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani to formally protest the incident.
Spokespeople for both leaders have not responded to requests for comment. A spokesperson for the RAI program told CNN the video speaks for itself and did not rule out filing a formal complaint.
Gov. Tim Walz said President Donald Trump agreed to consider reducing the number of federal agents in Minnesota and pledged to talk to his Department of Homeland Security about ensuring state officials can investigate Saturday's fatal shooting.
The two leaders spoke by phone Monday morning, with Trump also describing it as “a good call.” The comments marked a notable shift in tone from the president, who has repeatedly attacked Minnesota Democratic officials.
In the full readout from Walz's office, the Minnesota governor said he argued to Trump that there needs to be “impartial investigations of the Minneapolis shootings involving federal agents, and that we need to reduce the number of federal agents in Minnesota.”
Walz's office said the president agreed to talk to DHS “about ensuring the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is able to conduct an independent investigation, as would ordinarily be the case.”
Walz said Trump “also agreed to look into reducing the number of federal agents in Minnesota and working with the state in a more coordinated fashion on immigration enforcement regarding violent criminals.”
Trump has called for more cooperation from Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, including that they “turn over” all undocumented immigrants incarcerated in the state to federal authorities.
“The Governor reminded President Trump that the Minnesota Department of Corrections already honors federal detainers by notifying Immigration and Customs Enforcement when a person committed to its custody isn't a U.S. citizen,” Walz's office said.
Members of the Minnesota National Guard handed out coffee, hot chocolate, donuts and hand warmers to protesters and others outside the Whipple Federal Building in frigid Minneapolis temperatures Sunday.
A guardsman on the scene told CNN affiliate WCCO that the hospitality was their “demonstration of safety and security and that they're here to help.”
The guardsmen in the video were wearing reflective yellow vests, which the Guard has said is “to help distinguish them from other agencies in similar uniforms.”
“These Minnesota National Guardsmen live, work, and serve in our state, and are focused on protecting life, preserving property, and ensuring Minnesotans can safely exercise their First Amendment rights,” the Guard previously posted online.
The Whipple Federal Building, where many people are temporarily detained after being taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, has become a site of steady crowds and demonstrations against the immigration enforcement blitz in Minnesota.
Gov. Tim Walz activated the National Guard to assist Hennepin County law enforcement with crowd control and to provide backup to Minneapolis police.
CNN's Yan Kaner contributed to this report
Facing a lawsuit requesting an end to Operation Metro Surge in the Twin Cities, a Trump administration attorney said the surge of federal agents is to enforce the law, not coerce the state to change its policies.
“If you work with us, we will probably need less resources, less boots on the ground,” Department of Justice attorney Brantley Mayers said during a federal court hearing in Minnesota this morning.
Today's hearing — which still is underway — relates to a lawsuit in which Minnesota and the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul seek an end to Operation Metro Surge, the federal government's influx of immigration officers into the Minneapolis area. The plaintiffs first want a temporary restraining order that would halt the operation while the suit plays out.
Judge Katherine Menendez asked if there was any legal boundary to the number of federal officers that could be sent to the state.
“Would 10,000 ICE agents on the ground in the Twin Cities cross the line?” Menendez asked. “I mean, is there no limit to what the executive can do under the guise of enforcement of immigration law?”
“I have a hard time (believing) there is a judicially administrable line as to when too many boots on the ground is too many,” Mayers responded.
Menendez spoke skeptically about President Trump's online January 13 statement that the state would get a “day of reckoning & retribution,” but Mayers said the president's threats don't affect his power.
“I don't think that would negate the fact that there is legitimate law enforcement activity going on in Minnesota that the federal government has the authority to do,” he said.
President Donald Trump said Monday that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz called him “with the request to work together with respect to Minnesota” and that he facilitated a call between Walz and border czar Tom Homan, who the president is sending to the state.
“It was a very good call, and we, actually, seemed to be on a similar wavelength,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, striking a notably conciliatory tone, given how he and other administration officials have repeatedly attacked Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey.
“I told Governor Walz that I would have Tom Homan call him, and that what we are looking for are any and all Criminals that they have in their possession. The Governor, very respectfully, understood that, and I will be speaking to him in the near future,” Trump said, adding that Walz is “happy” Homan is going to Minnesota.
Trump emphasized “tremendous SUCCESS” with federal coordination in other cities, ending on an optimistic note: “Both Governor Walz and I want to make it better!”
CNN has reached out to Walz's office for comment on the call.
Just yesterday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt accused Walz of spreading “malicious lies about federal law enforcement officers,” “placing targets” on their backs and encouraging chaos.
Trump's request for cooperation was part of a list of demands he posted on social media Sunday night, calling on Walz, Frey and every Democratic governor and mayor to “to enforce our Nation's Laws, rather than resist and stoke the flames of Division, Chaos, and Violence.”
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Jaxon Smith-Njigba spoke on the Seattle Seahawks' 31-27 win over the Los Angeles Rams in the NFC Championship.
Los Angeles Rams head coach Sean McVay faced criticism for his decision-making in the NFC Championship loss to the Seattle Seahawks on Sunday night.
There were a few plays that caught the attention of NFL fans and pundits as the Seahawks narrowly edged the Rams, 31-27.
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Los Angeles Rams head coach Sean McVay watches from the sideline during the second half of the NFC Championship NFL football game against the Seattle Seahawks, Sunday, Jan. 25, 2026, in Seattle. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)
The first came on his timeout usage late in the game. McVay took a timeout before Seahawks quarterback Sam Darnold found Cooper Kupp to convert a third down with 3:20 left. He took another timeout after the play as he appeared to be getting ready to challenge the spot of the ball. But after a discussion with officials, McVay didn't challenge the play.
The Rams eventually stopped the Seahawks and got the ball back with 31 seconds left. But the team couldn't muster up a comeback.
McVay also faced scrutiny for his decision to have the team go for it on fourth down on their first drive of the fourth quarter. Matthew Stafford led the team on a 14-play, 84-yard drive that ended with a turnover on downs. If Los Angeles took the points, it would have only been a one-point game.
Los Angeles Rams head coach Sean McVay reacts as players warm up before the NFC Championship NFL football game against the Seattle Seahawks, Sunday, Jan. 25, 2026, in Seattle. (AP Photo/Stephen Brashear)
SUPER BOWL LX: WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT THE GAME
"There are a lot of people that are gonna say, ‘Analytics,' and ESPN analytics will say, ‘Go.' At some point, understand the momentum of the game. Understand how it goes," ESPN analyst Booger McFarland said on "NFL Primetime." "In that situation, if you're Sean McVay, you bring (Harrison) Mevis out there, you kick the field goal. Now, you put the pressure back on Seattle's offense.
"Now, if you're Seattle's offense, if you go three-and-out and you give the ball back, we don't need to drive for a touchdown. We got a kicker that can kick a 50-yarder and we're on turf so we don't have to worry about the footing. So, now the pressure goes back to Seattle's offense to keep the football."
McFarland added, "You can win with field goals."
The ESPN analyst was far from the only one who questioned McVay's play calls.
McVay was extremely disappointed with the result and said he firmly believed his team would be celebrating at Lumen Field.
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Los Angeles Rams head coach Sean McVay speaks during a news conference after the NFC Championship NFL football game against the Seattle Seahawks, Sunday, Jan. 25, 2026, in Seattle. (AP Photo/John Froschauer)
"I'm pretty numb. ... I think the finality of all of it when you don't allow yourself to even think about anything other than just advancing, I felt like we were going to be the team on that podium and we weren't, and you give Seattle the credit, but I love this group and I'm never really short on words, and I am right now," he said.
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Ryan Gaydos is a senior editor for Fox News Digital.
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Thousands of anti-ICE protesters marched through Minneapolis on Sunday to voice their anger at the fatal shooting of a local man a day earlier. “Shut it down,” they chanted, as many waved signs calling for justice for 37-year-old Alex Pretti who was shoot and killed by a Border Patrol agent on Saturday morning. (AP video by Laura Bargfeld)
A federal judge is hearing arguments on whether she should at least temporarily halt the immigration crackdown in Minnesota that has led to the fatal shootings of two people by government officers.
The state of Minnesota and the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul sued the Department of Homeland Security earlier this month, five days after Renee Good was shot by an Immigration and Customs officer. The shooting of Alex Pretti by a Border Patrol officer on Saturday has only added urgency to the case.
Since the original court filing, the state and cities have substantially added to their original request in an effort to restore the order that existed before the Trump administration launched Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota on Dec. 1. The lawsuit asks U.S. District Judge Katherine Menendez to order a reduction in the number of federal law enforcement officers and agents in Minnesota back to the level before the surge and to limit the scope of the enforcement operation.
Here's what to know:
Monday's hearing in federal court on Minnesota and the Twin Cities' suit aiming to halt the Trump administration's surge of immigration law enforcement has ended without the judge ruling from the bench.
U.S. District Court Judge Katherine Menendez said if “there were a burner in front of the front burner” this issue would be on it for her and she plans to issue a written opinion, though didn't specify when.
A Monday morning call between President Donald Trump and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz about fatal shootings by immigration officers appears to have been well-received by both sides.
Walz' office said the call was “productive.”
“The Governor made the case that we need impartial investigations of the Minneapolis shootings involving federal agents, and that we need to reduce the number of federal agents in Minnesota,” his office wrote in a release.
Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both Minnesota residents and U.S. citizens, were fatally shot and killed by federal immigration officers in separate incidents in Minneapolis.
Trump agreed to talk to the Department of Homeland Security about ensuring the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is able to conduct an independent investigation, Walz' office said, and also agreed to look into either reducing the number of federal agents in Minnesota or working with the state “in a more coordinated fashion on immigration enforcement regarding violent criminals.”
Trump wrote in a social media post earlier Monday that the two “actually” seem to be on the same page in wanting to work together on immigration issues in Minnesota. He said the people the administration is seeking “are any and all Criminals that they have in their possession” and Walz “very respectfully, understood that.”
More than 3,000 federal immigration officers are part of the immigration enforcement surge in Minnesota, a Department of Justice attorney told a federal judge on Monday.
Brantley Mayers, counsel to the DOJ's assistant attorney general, told U.S. District Judge Katherine Menendez that at least 2,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and at least 1,000 Customs and Border Patrol officers were part of the operation, and that he would provide her with an exact number later.
Minnesota state and Twin Cities officials have asked Menendez to halt the immigration crackdown, which has led to widespread unrest. Two Minnesota residents have been shot and killed by immigration officials since the crackdown began.
Menendez asked Mayers why so many officers were needed. Mayers said it had to do with complications surrounding how immigration officers typically stage for enforcement operations, gathering in parking lots.
Twin Cities officials have taken steps to prohibit city-owned parking lots and garages from being used in immigration enforcement operations. Chicago officials took similar steps after immigration crackdowns in that city last year.
“I failed to view the DHS funding vote as a referendum on the illegal and immoral conduct of ICE in Minneapolis,” Rep. Tom Suozzi, D-N.Y., posted on social media. “I hear the anger from many of my constituents, and I take responsibility for that. I have long been critical of ICE's unlawful behavior and I must do a better job demonstrating that.”
Suozzi was one of the seven moderate Democrats who voted with Republicans last week to pass a tranche of funding for the Department of Homeland Security.
The congressman added that the “senseless and tragic murder of Alex Pretti underscores what happens when untrained federal agents operate without accountability” and called on President Donald Trump to end ICE's enhanced enforcement operation in Minnesota.
A federal judge asked a Justice Department attorney about the federal government's motivation behind the immigration crackdown in Minnesota during a hearing on the state's request for an emergency halt to the immigration enforcement.
“So the goal of the surge is not to get the state and cities to change sanctuary policies?” Menendez asked Brantley Mayers, counsel to the DOJ's assistant attorney general.
No, Mayers said — the goal is to enforce federal law.
The judge also expressed skepticism about a letter recently sent by Attorney General Pam Bondi to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz asking the state to allow the federal government to access state voter roles, turn over state Medicaid and food assistance records, and repeal sanctuary policies. All three requests are the subject of litigation, she noted.
“Would 10,000 ICE agents on the ground in the Twin Cities cross the line?” Menendez asked Mayers. “I mean, is there no limit to what the executive can do under the guise of enforcing immigration law?”
Mayers said one lawful action shouldn't be used to discredit another lawful action.
“I don't see how the fact that we're also doing additional things that we are allowed to do, that the Constitution has vested us with doing, would in any way negate another piece of the same operation, the same surge.”
FILE - Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz speaks during a House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing, June 12, 2025, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, File)
FILE - President Donald Trump speaks before departing on Marine One from the South Lawn of the White House, Jan. 20, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
And the president said the two “actually” seem to be on the same page in wanting to work together as it relates to immigration issues in Minnesota.
Trump said the people the administration is seeking “are any and all Criminals that they have in their possession” and Walz “very respectfully, understood that.”
“He was happy that Tom Homan was going to Minnesota, and so am I!” Trump wrote in a social media post which was notable for its warm and collaborative tone toward Minnesota's governor, whom Trump frequently derides.
At issue is whether the federal court should at least temporarily halt the immigration crackdown in Minnesota that's led to the fatal shootings of two people by government officers.
In arguments before U.S. District Judge Katherine Menendez, lawyers for the state and Twin Cities argued the situation is so dire on the street as to require the court to halt the federal government's immigration enforcement actions.
“If this is not stopped right here, right now, I don't think anybody who is seriously looking at this problem can have much faith in how our republic is going to go in the future,” Minnesota Assistant Attorney General Brian Carter said.
The Justice Department's attorneys were set to speak later Monday.
Judge Menendez asked attorneys for the state and cities where she should draw the line between legitimate law enforcement response and one that violates the Constitution.
FILE - Former Vice President Mike Pence, waits outside the funeral services for former Vice President Dick Cheney at the Washington National Cathedral, Thursday, Nov. 20, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
“The images of this incident are deeply troubling and a full and transparent investigation of this officer involved shooting must take place immediately,” the Republican who served during President Trump's first term wrote on X. He also said he was praying for Alex Pretti's family as well as Minnesota citizens and state and federal law enforcement officers.
“The American people deserve to have safe streets, our laws enforced and our constitutional rights of Freedom of Speech, peaceable assembly and the right to keep and bear Arms respected and preserved all at the same time,” Pence wrote. “That's how Law and Order and Freedom work together in America.”
Pence is one of a growing number of Republicans to press for a deeper investigation into federal immigration tactics in Minnesota.
A woman holds a sign memorializing Renee Good as activists protest outside an ICE facility in Pflugerville, Texas, requesting the organization to leave the county, Thursday, Jan. 8, 2026, in solidarity with nationwide protests after the killing of U.S. citizen Renee Good by ICE agents in Minneapolis on Wednesday. (Mikala Compton/Austin American-Statesman via AP)
The attorney representing the family of Renee Good, who was fatally shot by a federal immigration officer earlier this month in Minneapolis, said in a statement that it was “terrifying, deeply disturbing, and heartbreaking” that another person had died.
“It is time for a hard reset,” attorney Antonio Romanucci said in the statement released Sunday. “ICE agents can leave Minneapolis. The residents of Minnesota cannot. We call for a complete and immediate end to the ICE invasion of this beautiful American city.”
Minnesota gubernatorial candidate Chris Madel, a Minneapolis attorney who provided legal support to the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good, ended his GOP campaign in a surprise video announcement Monday.
Madel called the recent immigration enforcement operation in the Twin Cities an “unmitigated disaster.”
“I cannot support the national Republican's stated retribution on the citizens of our state,” Madel said. “Nor can I count myself a member of a party that would do so.”
He was among a large group of candidates seeking to replace Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, who dropped his reelection bid earlier this month. Madel described himself as a “pragmatist,” and said national Republicans “have made it nearly impossible for a Republican to win a statewide election in Minnesota.”
“I have read about and I have spoken to help countless United States citizens who have been detained in Minnesota due to the color of their skin,” Madel said.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announces issuing “investigative subpoenas” to Orange County employees during a press conference in Orlando, Fla., on Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2025. (Stephen M. Dowell/Orlando Sentinel via AP, File)
That support from the Republican governor for the Department of Homeland Security's immigration enforcement efforts came Monday as tensions in Minnesota ratcheted up over the weekend following the fatal shooting of a Minneapolis protester by a federal agent.
DeSantis pointed to his administration's signing of cooperative agreements with Homeland Security agencies when it comes to detaining people in the U.S. illegally as a model for other states. As he has before, DeSantis noted that state and local law enforcement agencies had detained nearly 20,000 people in the U.S. illegally in the past year.
DeSantis made no mention of the fatal shooting of 37-year-old Alex Pretti by a federal officer Saturday. Following the shooting, several Republican elected officials have questioned President Trump's hard-line immigration crackdown in Minnesota, but DeSantis was not among them.
Homan will report directly to Trump, the president said in a social media post, adding that Homan is “tough but fair.”
“He has not been involved in that area, but knows and likes many of the people there,” Trump said Monday morning.
A growing number of Republicans are pressing for a deeper investigation into federal immigration tactics in Minnesota after a U.S. Border Patrol agent fatally shot a man in Minneapolis, a sign the Trump administration's accounting of events may face bipartisan scrutiny.
House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Andrew Garbarino sought testimony from leaders at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, saying “my top priority remains keeping Americans safe.”
A host of other congressional Republicans, including Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas and Sens. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, pressed for more information. Their statements, in addition to concern expressed from several Republican governors, reflected a party struggling with how to respond to Saturday's fatal shooting.
▶ Read more about Republicans' response to the shooting
The shooting of Pretti prompted some fellow Republicans to question Trump's hard-line immigration crackdown, but the president on Sunday night continued to blame Democratic officials.
After remaining relatively quiet on Sunday, the Republican president in two lengthy social media posts said that Democrats had encouraged people to obstruct law enforcement operations. He also called on officials in Minnesota to work with immigration officers and “turn over” people who were in the U.S. illegally.
“Tragically, two American Citizens have lost their lives as a result of this Democrat ensued chaos,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social media network.
Trump's refusal to back away from his pledge to carry out the largest deportation program in history and the surge of immigration officers to heavily Democratic cities came as more Republicans began calling for a deeper investigation and expressing unease with some of the administration's tactics.
▶ Read more about Trump's comments
Video captures a confrontation between federal officers and a 37-year-old man leading up to a fatal shooting in Minneapolis. This shooting comes amid widespread protests after the shooting of Renee Good.
Leaders of law enforcement organizations expressed alarm Sunday over the latest deadly shooting by federal officers in Minneapolis while use-of-force experts criticized the Trump administration's justification of the killing, saying bystander footage contradicted its narrative of what prompted it.
The federal government also faced criticism over the lack of a civil rights inquiry by the U.S. Justice Department and its efforts to block Minnesota authorities from conducting their own review of the killing of Pretti.
In a bid to ease tensions, the International Association of Chiefs of Police called on the White House to convene discussions “as soon as practicable” among federal, state and local law enforcement.
While questions remained about the latest confrontation, use-of-force experts told The Associated Press that bystander video undermined federal authorities' claim that Pretti “approached” a group of lawmen with a firearm and that a Border Patrol officer opened fire “defensively.” There has been no evidence made public, they said, that supports a claim by Border Patrol senior official Greg Bovino that Pretti, who had a permit to carry a concealed handgun, intended to “massacre law enforcement.”
▶ Read more about the videos
The state of Minnesota and the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul sued the Department of Homeland Security earlier this month, five days after Renee Good was shot by an Immigration and Customs officer. Saturday's shooting by a Border Patrol officer of Alex Pretti has only added urgency to the case.
Since the original filing, the state and cities have substantially added to their original request. They're trying to restore the state of affairs that existed before the Trump administration launched Operation Metro Surge on Dec. 1.
The hearing is set for Monday morning in federal court in Minneapolis. Democratic Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said he plans to personally attend.
They're asking that U.S. District Judge Katherine Menendez order federal law enforcement agencies to reduce the numbers of officers and agents in Minnesota to levels before the surge, while allowing them to continue to enforce immigration laws within a long list of proposed limits.
▶ Read more about the hearing
This item has been corrected to show the judges' first name is Katherine, not Kathleen.
Democratic senators are vowing to oppose a funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security following the shooting death of a 37-year-old Minnesota man, a stand that increases the prospect of a partial government shutdown by the end of the week.
Six of the 12 annual spending bills for the current budget year have been signed into law by President Donald Trump. Six more are awaiting action in the Senate, despite a revolt from House Democrats and mounting calls for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's impeachment.
If senators fail to act by midnight Friday, funding for Homeland Security and the other agencies covered under the six bills will lapse.
Republicans will need some Democratic support to pass the remaining spending bills in time to avoid a partial shutdown. That support was already in question after Renee Good, a mother of three, was fatally shot and killed earlier this month by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis. But the fatal shooting Saturday of Alex Pretti, an intensive care unit nurse, quickly prompted Democrats to take a more forceful stand.
▶ Read more about the possible shutdown
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Fox News correspondent Griff Jenkins reports on the Trump administration's expansion of immigration enforcement operations into Maine on ‘Special Report.'
As anti-ICE protests continue to erupt across the country, a new Maine law restricting cooperation between state law enforcement and federal immigration authorities is set to take effect after Democratic Gov. Janet Mills declined to veto or delay the measure, drawing renewed criticism over her progressive record as she runs for Senate.
The law, passed by Maine's Democrat-controlled legislature late last year, will soon take effect after the current legislative session ends and bars state and local law enforcement from assisting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a wide range of civil immigration matters.
Even though the law has not officially taken effect, Mills, who declined to veto or sign the law, which will take effect without her signature, has already ordered Maine State Police to begin enforcing its provisions, according to a report from the Portland Press Herald.
The legislation passed the Maine legislature by just one vote last year.
ICE LAUNCHES NEW OPERATION IN MAINE AMID TRUMP'S BROADER ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT CRACKDOWN AROUND THE US
ICE's federal law enforcement officers take a suspect into custody. (ICE)
Mills, who is running for Senate in the Democratic primary to unseat moderate Republican Sen. Susan Collins, has recently called ICE "secret police" and said their "reckless actions" have "no place here."
As ICE ramps up activity in Maine, including over 50 arrests in one day last week, Republicans in the state have pushed back against the ICE rhetoric coming from Mills.
"Let me be very clear: ICE agents are federal law enforcement officers," Assistant House Republican Leader Katrina Smith said last week. "They take an oath. They operate under federal authority. And they show up to work knowing that rhetoric alone can make them a target. You can oppose immigration policy without turning the people enforcing the law into enemies."
Mills released a statement on Saturday, shortly after federal immigration agents shot and killed an armed man in Minneapolis, demanding a meeting with President Trump and for him to remove ICE from Maine.
The immigration law is the latest in a series of high-profile decisions that critics say underscore Mills' liberal record as Maine prepares for her State of the State address later this month.
Since taking office, Mills has expanded eligibility for MaineCare, the state's Medicaid program, to include non-citizens regardless of immigration status. The policy allows taxpayer-funded health care for non-citizen children and pregnant individuals, a move Republicans say has driven up costs for working Mainers. State records show Maine has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on health care for individual illegal immigrants in recent years.
DEM GOVERNOR DROPS F-BOMB WHEN TROLLED FOR ALLEGED COCAINE USE
Democrat Gov. Janet Mills (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
MaineWire reported last month on a photo from a Maine city bus advertising how MaineCare is now being offered to "pregnant people and children under 21, with or without proof of citizenship" which prompted criticism of Mills from the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
Mills has also repeatedly clashed with Trump, most notably over transgender policies. Last year, she publicly confronted the president over federal funding threats tied to allowing transgender athletes to compete in women's sports, vowing to sue the administration if funding was withheld.
Her administration has signed and defended a slate of laws expanding access to gender-affirming care, including protections for minors to receive certain treatments even if parents object, mandates requiring insurance coverage for such care, and measures shielding providers from out-of-state legal action.
On abortion, Mills has signed legislation expanding who can perform abortions, removed criminal penalties tied to reproductive care, and strengthened protections for providers and patients traveling to Maine from other states.
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AN ICE agent seen standing in front of a house in a residential area. (Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Ultimately, the NRSC told Fox News Digital it believes Mills is more focused on a "progressive agenda" than she is on results for the state.
"Janet Mills has spent her time as Governor expanding transgender rights, offering taxpayer-funded healthcare to illegal aliens, and combating the Trump administration every chance she gets," NRSC Regional Press Secretary Samantha Cantrell told Fox News Digital.
"Mainers deserve a Senator who is focused on delivering real results, not Janet Mills who is more concerned with pushing her progressive agenda on Maine."
Fox News Digital reached out to Mills' campaign for comment.
Andrew Mark Miller is a reporter at Fox News. Find him on Twitter @andymarkmiller and email tips to AndrewMark.Miller@Fox.com.
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Live Updates
• Trump-Walz call: President Donald Trump struck a notable shift in tone after a call with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, saying they're “on a similar wavelength.” Walz said Trump agreed to consider reducing the number of federal agents in Minnesota.
• Border czar to Minnesota: Trump earlier said he is sending Tom Homan to the state, following the fatal shooting of ICU nurse Alex Pretti in an encounter Saturday with federal agents.
• Few details back claims: Federal officials have declined to provide critical details substantiating their claim an agent shot Pretti in self-defense. Read CNN's fact check of the Trump administration's claims, and watch analysis of videos from several angles.
• In court today: A judge heard arguments on whether to temporarily halt the immigration crackdown in Minnesota. Separately, a federal court hearing is set for today after a judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking federal agencies from destroying or altering evidence related to Pretti's killing.
Republican lawmakers are privately expressing relief that border czar Tom Homan will be taking over leadership of the immigration operations in Minnesota, sources told CNN.
“He knows what he's doing. He's gets it,” one Republican lawmaker told CNN, saying that Homan understood the system and how to do enforcement operations the “correct way.”
Homan is longtime border official with decades of law enforcement experience. While Homan has pushed for some of the Trump administration's most controversial immigration-related policies, allies and advisers view him as being “a grown up,” one source said.
Lawmakers have been stressing the importance of getting the messaging right on immigration to the White House for weeks, two sources told CNN. The sources stressed that they still support Trump's immigration crackdown and believe that the country does too, but they felt that the White House was not articulating a thought-out plan to the public.
On the shooting of Alex Pretti in Minnesota over the weekend, Republican allies and advisers told CNN that no one should be getting ahead of an investigation.
“I think everyone wants a transparent and independent investigation,” one lawmaker said. “It seems the White House is getting that message, or at least I hope they are.”
Gov. Tim Walz said President Donald Trump agreed to consider reducing the number of federal agents in Minnesota and pledged to talk to his Department of Homeland Security about ensuring state officials can investigate Saturday's fatal shooting.
The two leaders spoke by phone Monday morning, with Trump also describing it as “a good call.” The comments marked a notable shift in tone from the president, who has repeatedly attacked Minnesota Democratic officials.
In the full readout from Walz's office, the Minnesota governor said he argued to Trump that there needs to be “impartial investigations of the Minneapolis shootings involving federal agents, and that we need to reduce the number of federal agents in Minnesota.”
Walz's office said the president agreed to talk to DHS “about ensuring the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is able to conduct an independent investigation, as would ordinarily be the case.”
Walz said Trump “also agreed to look into reducing the number of federal agents in Minnesota and working with the state in a more coordinated fashion on immigration enforcement regarding violent criminals.”
Trump has called for more cooperation from Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, including that they “turn over” all undocumented immigrants incarcerated in the state to federal authorities.
“The Governor reminded President Trump that the Minnesota Department of Corrections already honors federal detainers by notifying Immigration and Customs Enforcement when a person committed to its custody isn't a U.S. citizen,” Walz's office said.
Members of the Minnesota National Guard handed out coffee, hot chocolate, donuts and hand warmers to protesters and others outside the Whipple Federal Building in frigid Minneapolis temperatures Sunday.
A guardsman on the scene told CNN affiliate WCCO that the hospitality was their “demonstration of safety and security and that they're here to help.”
The guardsmen in the video were wearing reflective yellow vests, which the Guard has said is “to help distinguish them from other agencies in similar uniforms.”
“These Minnesota National Guardsmen live, work, and serve in our state, and are focused on protecting life, preserving property, and ensuring Minnesotans can safely exercise their First Amendment rights,” the Guard previously posted online.
The Whipple Federal Building, where many people are temporarily detained after being taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, has become a site of steady crowds and demonstrations against the immigration enforcement blitz in Minnesota.
Gov. Tim Walz activated the National Guard to assist Hennepin County law enforcement with crowd control and to provide backup to Minneapolis police.
CNN's Yan Kaner contributed to this report
Facing a lawsuit requesting an end to Operation Metro Surge in the Twin Cities, a Trump administration attorney said the surge of federal agents is to enforce the law, not coerce the state to change its policies.
“If you work with us, we will probably need less resources, less boots on the ground,” Department of Justice attorney Brantley Mayers said during a federal court hearing in Minnesota this morning.
Today's hearing — which still is underway — relates to a lawsuit in which Minnesota and the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul seek an end to Operation Metro Surge, the federal government's influx of immigration officers into the Minneapolis area. The plaintiffs first want a temporary restraining order that would halt the operation while the suit plays out.
Judge Katherine Menendez asked if there was any legal boundary to the number of federal officers that could be sent to the state.
“Would 10,000 ICE agents on the ground in the Twin Cities cross the line?” Menendez asked. “I mean, is there no limit to what the executive can do under the guise of enforcement of immigration law?”
“I have a hard time (believing) there is a judicially administrable line as to when too many boots on the ground is too many,” Mayers responded.
Menendez spoke skeptically about President Trump's online January 13 statement that the state would get a “day of reckoning & retribution,” but Mayers said the president's threats don't affect his power.
“I don't think that would negate the fact that there is legitimate law enforcement activity going on in Minnesota that the federal government has the authority to do,” he said.
President Donald Trump said Monday that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz called him “with the request to work together with respect to Minnesota” and that he facilitated a call between Walz and border czar Tom Homan, who the president is sending to the state.
“It was a very good call, and we, actually, seemed to be on a similar wavelength,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, striking a notably conciliatory tone, given how he and other administration officials have repeatedly attacked Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey.
“I told Governor Walz that I would have Tom Homan call him, and that what we are looking for are any and all Criminals that they have in their possession. The Governor, very respectfully, understood that, and I will be speaking to him in the near future,” Trump said, adding that Walz is “happy” Homan is going to Minnesota.
Trump emphasized “tremendous SUCCESS” with federal coordination in other cities, ending on an optimistic note: “Both Governor Walz and I want to make it better!”
CNN has reached out to Walz's office for comment on the call.
Just yesterday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt accused Walz of spreading “malicious lies about federal law enforcement officers,” “placing targets” on their backs and encouraging chaos.
Trump's request for cooperation was part of a list of demands he posted on social media Sunday night, calling on Walz, Frey and every Democratic governor and mayor to “to enforce our Nation's Laws, rather than resist and stoke the flames of Division, Chaos, and Violence.”
Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi is expressing regret for his vote to fund the Department of Homeland Security last week in the wake of the second fatal shooting by a federal agent in Minneapolis.
“I failed to view the DHS funding vote as a referendum on the illegal and immoral conduct of ICE in Minneapolis. I hear the anger from my constituents, and I take responsibility for that. I have long been critical of ICE's unlawful behavior and I must do a better job demonstrating that,” Suozzi said in a statement on Monday.
Suozzi, who represents a swing district in New York, was one of seven Democrats who crossed party lines to back the bill last Thursday, sending it to the Senate – along with other bills to fund the government – for consideration.
“The senseless and tragic murder of Alex Pretti underscores what happens when untrained federal agents operate without accountability. President Trump must immediately end ‘Operation Metro Surge' and ICE's occupation of Minneapolis that has sown chaos, led to tragedy, and undermined experienced local law enforcement,” Suozzi said.
For context: The violence has caused unease among Democrats, as well as several Republicans, as they face a January 30 deadline to fund DHS and other federal agencies.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced Saturday evening that his caucus would not pass a bill to fund a large portion of the government, including DHS, unless restrictions are placed on immigration enforcement, increasing the likelihood of a partial government shutdown Friday at midnight.
During an opening exchange with attorneys that lasted well over an hour, a federal judge said today she is reluctant to decide the merits of the Trump administration's immigration policy as the state of Minnesota asks her to roll back Operation Metro Surge.
“The state has one set of values around immigration enforcement … the federal government has a different set of values captured in its enforcement,” Judge Katherine Menendez, a Biden appointee, said. “We're at risk of asking me to decide who's right here.”
Today's hearing in Minnesota – which still is underway – relates to a lawsuit in which the state and the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul seek a temporary restraining order halting Operation Metro Surge, the federal government's surge of immigration officers into the Minneapolis area.
Noting state attorneys had raised a number of concerns from the stress on local law enforcement to warrantless entry of homes, Menendez said, “I can't be the global keeper of all the things here.”
Minnesota Assistant Attorney General Brian Carter said he was not asking the judge to make a judgment on policy, but cited a Truth Social post from President Trump to assert the administration has clearly gone too far.
“He said, ‘Minnesota, your day of retribution is here.' It's crazy!” Carter said, emphatically raising his hands in the air. “How can that not violate equal sovereignty?”
When Menendez asked how the state wanted Operation Metro Surge to be changed, Carter replied, “Just end it. End the whole thing.”
After a brief recess, the hearing has resumed with Trump administration attorneys beginning to present their side of the case.
The White House border czar who President Donald Trump is deploying to Minnesota following the fatal shooting of two American citizens is a longtime border official who has pushed for some of the Trump administration's most controversial immigration-related policies.
Trump said today he was sending Tom Homan to Minnesota this evening, following Saturday's fatal shooting of Alex Pretti. The incident has inflamed tensions and drawn bipartisan criticism for the Department of Homeland Security's portrayal — without evidence — of Pretti as a terrorist who wanted to massacre law enforcement.
Homan has decades worth of law enforcement experience. As acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump's first term, Homan served as the public face and vocal defender of some of the administration's most contentious policies, including the separation of children and families who cross the border.
He said at a public event in September 2017 that his agency would arrest undocumented people who came forward to care for the children, which previous administrations had avoided.
He virulently opposes “sanctuary city” policies that restrict local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration efforts.
The New York Times reported in September that Homan was recorded in 2024 accepting a bag that contained $50,000 in cash by undercover FBI agents in an investigation the Trump Justice Department later closed.
A person familiar with the operation had told CNN that Homan accepted the cash as part of a sting operation, and that Homan was being investigated for potential bribery and other crimes after he agreed to help the undercover agents secure government contracts. Homan, meanwhile, has denied doing anything illegal.
But the Department of Justice shut down the investigation after Trump began his second term last year, over doubts prosecutors could prove Homan had agreed to a specific act in exchange for the cash and because he was not in a government position at the time. The White House later called the investigation into Homan “blatantly political.”
CNN's Kaitlan Collins and Isabelle D'Antonio contributed.
A White House official said Monday that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem will remain in her role leading the department and retains the confidence and trust of President Donald Trump.
The assertion came soon after Trump announced he was dispatching veteran ICE official Tom Homan to lead operations in Minnesota. The move suggested he was sidelining top Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino, whose heavy handed enforcement style had Noem's backing, even as it drew criticism.
“Secretary Noem will continue to lead the Department of Homeland Security with the full trust and confidence of the President,” a White House official told CNN.
“Tom Homan is uniquely positioned to drop everything and focus solely on Minnesota to solve the problems that have been created by a lack of cooperation from state and local officials,” the official added.
Homan has generally sought to focus enforcement on public safety and national security threats, as well as so-called “collaterals,” meaning undocumented immigrants that may be in the vicinity of a targeted operation. That is slightly different from the broad sweeps that have been occurring in cities nationwide. And Homan and Noem have at time been at odds; the two have generally not spoken to each other in recent months, according to US officials.
Senate Democrats and Republicans are weighing how to move forward on funding the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies, according to sources familiar with the matter, and the clock is ticking with a January 30 deadline to fund the government.
Aides emphasized that the dynamics fundamentally shifted over the last 72 hours following the deadly shooting in Minneapolis. On Friday, no one was anticipating a government shutdown. By Saturday night, it became clear that there may be little way to avoid one.
Republicans say they are exploring all options as it relates to Democratic demands to strip the DHS bill out of the House-passed six-bill appropriations package to fund the government. A top goal, they say, is to prevent a shutdown of what amounts to 75% of the government's spending.
Democrats, meanwhile, are trying to coalesce around a single set of demands, but a source familiar with those talks said conversations about what kinds of reforms Democrats will seek as it pertains to DHS are still ongoing. Democratic leaders are still soliciting suggestions and ideas from their members.
Nothing is at all finalized, however, and a quick compromise between the parties on changes to ICE would be difficult.
Read more on the latest from Capitol Hill.
Operation Metro Surge is not an effort to ensure the safety of people in Minnesota, the state attorney general's office argued in federal court this morning, but is rather an attempt to force the state into cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a way that courts have said the federal government can't require.
“This administration is not content with the rule of law,” Minnesota Assistant Attorney General Brian Carter said during the hearing, which still is underway. “They are not content with letting the courts work this stuff out. Instead, they put violence onto the streets of Minnesota to get what they want.”
Today's hearing in Minnesota relates to a lawsuit, filed earlier this month by the state and the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, seeking a temporary restraining order halting Operation Metro Surge, the federal government's surge of immigration officers into the Minneapolis area.
During legal arguments — which so far have lasted nearly an hour -— state attorneys said that a letter from US Attorney General Pam Bondi to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz over the weekend that appears to set conditions on the end of the surge shows the operation is not primarily about law enforcement.
“Moving the goalposts like that exhibits malice. That exhibits coercion; that exhibits a unilateral, ‘You're going to do what I want you to do, and that's the end of it. And you'd better pray I don't alter the bargain anymore,'” Carter said.
Trump administration lawyers have not yet been given the opportunity to speak in the hearing.
A group of federal government health care workers said in a letter to the US Senate that Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations pose “a clear threat to the health and safety of our communities,” and called on Congress to vote against funding for the Department of Homeland Security.
The letter was sent by Save HHS, a grassroots group of current and former Health and Human Services workers. It comes two days after Alex Pretti, a Veterans Affairs nurse, was fatally shot by a federal agent in Minneapolis.
“As a Veterans Affairs nurse, Alex took the same oath we did: to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” the letter said. “Like Alex, we are compelled to speak out against threats to our nation.”
Democrats have said they will reject a bill to fund DHS over the shooting, raising the possibility of a partial government shutdown. The workers wrote in the letter that they could be furloughed if the spending package fails to pass but say “ICE and CBP are a greater threat to the health of our nation than the lapse of HHS services.”
It continues: “ICE now poses a clear threat to the health and safety of our communities. Families are skipping medical appointments, going without food, and keeping their children out of school for fear of abduction, deportation without due process, or violent assault. U.S. citizens also fear for their safety and well-being when ICE or CBP are present.”
A federal judge said in court this morning she was “having a hard time” determining how she would have the authority to roll back Operation Metro Surge as requested by the state of Minnesota and the Twin Cities.
Today's hearing in Minnesota relates to a lawsuit, filed earlier this month by the state and the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, seeking a temporary restraining order stopping Operation Metro Surge, the federal government's surge of immigration officers into the Minneapolis area.
“I think it kind of goes without saying that we are in shockingly unusual times,” District Court Judge Katherine Menendez said during today's hearing. “I don't know that that gives me greater license to craft a remedy in the 10th Amendment.”
Standing at a table alongside his boss, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, Assistant Attorney General Brian Carter acknowledged it is difficult for the state to cite a legal precedent for the order they seek.
“The difficulty with the case law on this situation is that the situation is unprecedented in the 250-year history of our country,” Carter said. “We have never had a federal government amass what is essentially an army of 3,000 to 4,000 masked, heavily armed federal agents and sent them into a state and basically stir the pot.”
An attorney for the state of Minnesota told a federal judge the state wants an immediate order bringing an end to Operation Metro Surge in an impassioned opening statement at a court hearing this morning.
“Minnesota should not have to withstand another month, another week or another single day of the lawful and unchecked invasion and occupation by thousands of federal agents,” Minnesota Assistant Attorney General Linsdey Middlecamp said.
“Since we filed (this lawsuit) on January 12, another person has been shot dead in broad daylight by DHS agents,” Middlecamp said, referring to Saturday's fatal shooting of protester Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
Today's hearing relates to a lawsuit, filed by the state of Minnesota and the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, for a temporary restraining order stopping Operation Metro Surge, the federal government's surge of immigration officers into the Minneapolis area.
Citing a letter sent to state leaders by US Attorney General Pam Bondi — which called on the state to repeal so-called sanctuary policies and to share Medicaid, food assistance and voter data with the federal government — Middlecamp accused the government of using Operation Metro Surge as a bargaining chip for political disputes.
“Pam Bondi sent what can only be described as a random note setting out the terms on which the federal government is holding Minnesota's public safety, public health and public education hostage,” Middlecamp said.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed that no one is interpreting the Trump administration's labeling of Alex Pretti's actions as domestic terrorism by the legal definition, despite Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem saying exactly that.
“I don't think anybody thinks that they were comparing what happened on Saturday to the legal definition of domestic terrorism. What we saw was a very violent altercation, and we — I am not going to prejudge the facts,” Blanche said on “Fox & Friends” on Monday morning.
Yet on Saturday, Noem directly compared Pretti's actions to the legal definition of domestic terrorism.
“When you perpetuate violence against a government because of ideological reasons and for reasons to resist and perpetuate violence, that is the definition of domestic terrorism. This individual, who came with weapons and ammunition to stop a law enforcement operation of federal law enforcement officers, committed an act of domestic terrorism. That's the facts,” Noem said.
Just hours after the shooting, top White House aide Stephen Miller called Alex Pretti a “domestic terrorist” who “tried to assassinate federal law endorsement.”
According to US code, domestic terrorism involves actions that are “dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State” and “appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping.”
Blanche's comments on Fox today also contradict what he said earlier in the interview, urging caution as an investigation plays out.
“We always investigate any conduct like this, any shooting like this,” he said, “We'll get to the bottom of everything that happened. But it is extraordinarily important that we do not jump to conclusions about anything that happened on Saturday morning.”
Immigration agents have opened fire in 19 incidents since the Trump administration began its immigration crackdown in June 2025, according to a newly updated analysis from The Trace, a nonprofit journalism organization that focuses on gun violence.
The analysis, which used data from the Gun Violence Archive, encompasses the operations in Minneapolis as well as previous operations in Los Angeles; Washington, DC; Memphis; Charlotte, North Carolina; Portland, Oregon; and New Orleans.
A federal court hearing in Minnesota on a lawsuit to end Operation Metro Surge, the federal government's surge of immigration officers into the Minneapolis area, has begun.
Judge Katherine Menendez is hearing the request — filed earlier this month by the state of Minnesota and the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul — for a temporary restraining order. The judge had said she wanted to hear from both sides before making a decision on the request.
The complaint argues the aggressive influx of federal immigration officers into the state “is driven by nothing more than the Trump Administration's desire to punish political opponents and score partisan points—at the direct expense of Plaintiffs' residents.”
The Trump administration's response says the lawsuit has “not a shred of legal support,” adding the president has “broad authority” to enforce federal immigration law.
They also want the judge to place several limits on federal officers who remain in the state, including prohibiting them from concealing their identities with masks and approaching suspects based only on “race, ethnicity, accented speech, or proximity to predominantly Immigrant-serving businesses or cultural centers.”
President Donald Trump's announcement that Tom Homan, a veteran ICE official, is being dispatched to Minneapolis Monday suggests a potential sidelining of the heavy-handed tactics used by top Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino and underscores the ongoing internal dispute within the administration over executing the president's immigration agenda.
The move has been met with relief from some Homeland Security officials who have been waiting for Homan, the White House border czar, to weigh in, given his vast experience in federal law enforcement.
Bovino's enforcement style has been backed by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. But Homan has generally taken a more stringent approach to immigration enforcement — wanting to focus on public safety and national security threats, as well as so-called “collaterals,” meaning undocumented immigrants that may be in the vicinity of a targeted operation.
That is slightly different from the broad sweeps that have been occurring in cities nationwide. While Homan's publicly been in line with the Trump administration, there has been infighting between factions who back him and those who back Noem. Homan and Noem have generally not spoken to each other in recent months, according to US officials.
In a post on X Monday, Noem called Homan going to Minneapolis “good news,” saying: “I have worked closely with Tom over the last year and he has been a major asset to our team— his experience and insight will help us in our wide-scale fraud investigations, which have robbed Americans, and will help us to remove even more public safety threats and violent criminal illegal aliens off the of streets of Minneapolis.”
Homan is expected to manage ICE operation in Minnesota, according to the White House. It was not immediately clear how Bovino's role would change going forward.
President Donald Trump sending his Border Czar Tom Homan to Minnesota, “is just escalating tensions,” Minneapolis City Council member Soren Stevenson said.
“They are losing the battle in people's minds,” Stevenson told CNN's Sara Sidner. “Because we're seeing the video. We're seeing what's happening. We're seeing that this is Minnesota.”
“They're losing this narrative battle, and so he's sending in his top guard. And really, it's escalating, because we just want to be left alone,” he added. “The chaos in our community is coming from ICE. It's coming from this invasion that we're under … and it's got to stop.”
Passing a bill to issue further government funding to the Department of Homeland Security after Saturday's fatal shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis is something American people “cannot stand for,” US Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-New York, said today.
“We should not be passing any money to DHS so they can continue the kind of harassment and execution, as we saw, by ICE, of American citizens,” Meeks told John Berman on “CNN News Central.”
“This is something that we cannot stand for, and it should not be who we are because it's not who we are as American people,” he added.
Meeks previously voted against the bill when it was brought to the House of Representatives, but it passed with some Democratic support. The lawmaker urged Democrats in the Senate to vote it down.
The congressman asserted that the administration's description of the incident that led to the death of Alex Pretti on Saturday conflicts with the footage captured and shared by civilians at the scene.
“What we're hearing is the same kind of rhetoric that you hear from totalitarian governments, like when you hear the ayatollah tell peaceful protesters they can't protest,” he said.
“Here, you have an individual with a camera … and he is now dead.Shot at 10 times. Hit several times. No investigation,” Meeks said. “And the Trump administration is saying that he was violently going after police officers, denying the American people what they can see with their own eyes.”
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Authorities in upstate South Carolina have arrested the 19-year-old grandson of a retired couple found slain in their home earlier this month, charging him with two counts of murder in a case that has shaken a small rural community.
The Oconee County Sheriff's Office said Levi Kevin Jones was taken into custody late Friday and charged in connection with the deaths of Larry Moore, 76, and Sandra Moore, 75, who were discovered inside their residence on Cromer Moore Road near Westminster on Jan. 15.
Jones is also charged with two counts of possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime, according to arrest warrants obtained by Fox News Digital. He remains in custody pending a bond hearing.
The couple was found after a family member requested a welfare check when repeated attempts to reach them were unsuccessful. Investigators and the county coroner later determined the deaths were homicides.
RETIRED SOUTH CAROLINA COUPLE FOUND DEAD IN HOMICIDE AT HOME
Larry and Sandra Moore are pictured during a church gathering at Calvary Church. The couple was later remembered by the congregation following their deaths. (Calvary Church Facebook)
According to the Oconee County Coroner's Office, Larry Moore died from multiple stabbing injuries, while Sandra Moore died from manual strangulation. Autopsies were conducted the following day.
Arrest warrants allege Jones stabbed his grandfather multiple times in the torso and neck and strangled his grandmother, cutting off her airway and blood flow. Authorities said a knife was used during the attack.
Authorities have not provided a motive for the attack.
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The Oconee County Sheriff's Office said the couple's grandson, Levi Kevin Jones, is charged with two counts of murder in the case, as well as two counts of possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime. (Oconee County Sheriff's Office)
The Moores were longtime residents of the area and well known in the community as the former owners of Moore & Moore Fish Camp, a local restaurant that operated for decades before the couple retired.
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They were also active members of Calvary Church, where friends described them as regular attendees.
"They were always there," Stacy Brooks, who attended church, told Fox News Digital. "You expected to see them every time you went. They were faithful people."
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The Oconee County Coroner's Office, which assisted in the investigation into the deaths of Larry and Sandra Moore, is shown in an exterior view. (Oconee County Coroner's Office)
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Brooks said the killings have been difficult for residents of the small upstate South Carolina town to process.
"This is a close community, and something like this just doesn't happen often," she said.
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The sheriff's office previously said the killings appeared to be an isolated incident and that there was no ongoing threat to the public.
Sarah Rumpf-Whitten is a U.S. Writer at Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to sarah.rumpf@fox.com and on X @s_rumpfwhitten
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An Arkansas teenager is behind bars and another man is in the hospital with serious injuries after video of a brutal fight at a local gas station went viral last weekend.
Officers with the Hot Springs Police Department responded to a Circle K gas station on Malvern Avenue in Hot Springs – located approximately 55 miles from Little Rock – around 11:30 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 17, according to FOX 16.
After arriving on scene, authorities located 20-year-old Noah Epperson unconscious and suffering from multiple injuries, the outlet reported.
According to a police report obtained by FOX 16, a fight broke out between two groups at a party earlier that night. Friends of Epperson reportedly told police that their group subsequently left the party and arrived at a nearby Circle K gas station when the second group allegedly followed.
KOHBERGER PLEA, CINCINNATI BEATING, READ VERDICT FUEL 2025'S MOST VIRAL, CONTROVERSIAL MOMENTS
A viral fight reportedly broke out at a Circle K gas station in Hot Springs, Arkansas, last week, in which 20-year-old Noah Epperson was knocked unconscious after suffering multiple serious injuries. (Google Maps)
A second fight reportedly broke out, with viral video showing Epperson being punched in the face by multiple alleged assailants and having his head stomped on.
Immediately following the brawl, bystanders began to leave, and local police were called to the scene by a concerned citizen who believed an individual had either been hurt or killed.
Epperson was transported to a hospital, where he was admitted into intensive care with a brain bleed, skull fracture and jaw fracture, according to a GoFundMe created to cover his medical bills.
NYU STUDENT SLAPPED FROM BEHIND, THROWN TO GROUND IN RANDOM ATTACK CAUGHT ON VIDEO
Cooper Camferdam, 18, is charged with felony first-degree battery stemming from a viral brawl in which 20-year-old Noah Epperson was seriously injured at a Circle K gas station in Hot Springs, Arkansas, on Saturday, Jan. 17, 2026. (Garland County Detention Center)
Two days after the alleged attack, 18-year-old Cooper Camferdam turned himself in to police in connection with the alleged attack, FOX 16 reported.
Police reportedly said Camferdam is the individual seen in the now-viral video stomping on Epperson's head, which ultimately left him unconscious.
"He has suffered a fracture to the skull, fracture to the jaw, and he has hearing loss on his left ear," Katie Epperson, Epperson's mother, told KARK. "The front of his face, there isn't anything. But both sides, big, purple ears and bruises."
VIDEO SHOWS WILD NEIGHBORHOOD STREET TAKEOVER AS VIOLENT MOB PUMMELS COUPLE, BURNS TRUCK
According to police, the fight reportedly broke out after two groups became involved in an altercation at a party earlier in the evening, with one group following the other to a Circle K gas station in Hot Springs, Arkansas, on Saturday, Jan. 17, 2026. (Google Maps)
"We'll kind of go from there to see if there will be any long-term effects," Katie Epperson said. "We just really don't know right now."
Camferdam is charged with felony first-degree battery and is being held in the Garland County Detention Center on $500,000 bond, according to arrest records obtained by Fox News Digital.
Police reportedly said they have used the video to identify additional persons of interest, and they expect to make more arrests.
The Hot Springs Police Department did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment.
Epperson's mother reportedly added that her son does not have health insurance, and is asking for the public's help in covering his medical bills while hoping for her son's speedy recovery.
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"We're looking into options to get these medical bills covered," Katie Epperson said, according to KARK. "But I really feel strongly that the suspect should pay the medical bills."
"I don't want anyone else to get hurt," she continued. "Let the law enforcement do their job, and justice will be served."
Julia Bonavita is a U.S. Writer for Fox News Digital and a Fox Flight Team drone pilot. You can follow her at @juliabonavita13 on all platforms and send story tips to julia.bonavita@fox.com.
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Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem defended labeling the Minneapolis suspect's actions as "domestic terrorism" during a press event on Saturday. (Credit: Pool)
More than half of all Democrats in the House of Representatives are now backing a resolution to impeach Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem in the wake of another federal law enforcement-involved shooting in Minneapolis.
The push to impeach Noem, led by Rep. Robin Kelly, D-Ill., has 133 Democrats as co-sponsors endorsing the effort as of Monday morning, her office told Fox News Digital. That's out of 213 total lawmakers in the House Democratic Caucus.
It's gaining steam among both progressive and moderate Democrats, like Rep. Laura Gillen, D-N.Y., who announced on Sunday that she too would support impeaching Noem amid the chaos in Minneapolis.
"Another U.S. citizen has been killed at the hands of ICE and there must be accountability, which is why Secretary Noem must be impeached immediately," Gillen posted on X.
BONDI BLAMES MINNEAPOLIS LEADERS AFTER ARMED SUSPECT KILLED, UNREST ERUPTS DURING ICE OPERATION
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem participates in a roundtable discussion with local ranchers and U.S. Customs and Border Protection employees in Brownsville, Texas, on Jan. 7, 2026. (Michael Gonzalez/Getty Images)
It's a notable expression of support; Gillen was one of only seven House Democrats to vote in favor of funding DHS last week as part of Congress' yearly federal appropriations process.
The surge of support comes after Alex Pretti, a nurse at Minneapolis' Veterans Affairs Medical Center, was shot and killed by a Border Patrol agent over the weekend during a wider demonstration against President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown in the Midwest city.
Noem said over the weekend that it appeared Pretti "arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement."
"An individual approached U.S. Border Patrol officers with a 9mm semiautomatic handgun. The officers attempted to disarm this individual, but the armed suspect reacted violently. Fearing for his life and for the lives of his fellow officers around him, an agent fired defensive shots," she said.
FREY, KLOBUCHAR CALL FOR ICE TO LEAVE MINNEAPOLIS FOLLOWING DEADLY CBP SHOOTING IN CITY
But various eyewitness accounts and critics of the Trump administration have disputed claims that Pretti was brandishing a weapon, though he was confirmed to be in possession of a handgun with a legal permit to carry.
Publicly circulated video of the incident shows him approaching federal officers holding what appeared to be his phone, filming as agents knocked a female agitator to the ground.
Pretti appeared to attempt to help the female agitator when he was knocked to the ground himself. One video angle appears to show an officer removing Pretti's weapon before he was shot.
Rep. Robin Kelly, D-Ill., prepares to speak at the City Club of Chicago on May 12, 2025. (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune via Getty Images)
The majority of Republicans have criticized Democratic leaders in Minnesota for fomenting anger toward federal officers among the population and for refusing to cooperate in Trump's offensive against illegal immigrants in the first place.
Meanwhile, Democrats have accused Trump officials of letting federal agents run amok with impunity and cause chaos in Minneapolis.
It's not clear if House Democratic leaders will support Kelly's push to impeach Noem now, but Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., told reporters to "stay tuned" last week when asked about the effort.
Any push to impeach Noem during this congressional term would likely be largely symbolic, however. It's highly unlikely that enough Republicans would vote with Democrats on the resolution to pass the House, or that it will get the 60 votes in the Senate needed for removal.
House Democrats' furor to boot Noem from her post has not quite made its way to the upper chamber, but it got support from one key moderate in the party.
NOEM SAYS 'ARRESTS COMING' AFTER ANTI-ICE MOB TARGETED MINNESOTA CHURCH
Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., echoed her colleagues in the lower chamber and demanded that the DHS head be impeached for being an "abject failure" at leading the agency.
Rosen, like several other congressional Democrats, reacted sharply to Pretti's killing and, so far, is the only Senate Democrat calling for Noem's impeachment.
The lawmaker argued that Noem's usage of ICE in Minnesota was the "latest proof" of her losing control over her own agency.
A screengrab from a video shows a law enforcement officer spraying irritants at Alex Pretti before he was fatally shot by federal agents in Minneapolis, on Jan. 24, 2026. (Reuters)
"Kristi Noem and her department's latest attempt to mislead the American public regarding the brutal and unjustified killing of Alex Pretti is deeply shameful, and she must be impeached and removed from office immediately," Rosen said.
Rosen's position carries weight, too, given that she is one of the more moderate members of the Senate Democratic caucus, and she was also one of a handful to cross the aisle to reopen the government during the longest closure in history last year.
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Senate Democrats are now ready to block the DHS funding bill as the deadline to fund the government and prevent another shutdown fast approaches.
DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin told Fox News Digital of Democrats' efforts, "DHS enforces the laws Congress passes, period. If certain members don't like those laws, changing them is literally their job."
"While ICE officers are facing a staggering 1,300% spike in assaults, too many politicians would rather defend criminals and attack the men and women who are enforcing our laws and did nothing while Joe Biden facilitated an invasion of tens of millions of illegal aliens into our country," McLaughlin said. "It's time they focus on protecting the American people, the work this Department is doing every day under Secretary Noem's leadership."
Elizabeth Elkind is a politics reporter for Fox News Digital leading coverage of the House of Representatives. Previous digital bylines seen at Daily Mail and CBS News.
Follow on Twitter at @liz_elkind and send tips to elizabeth.elkind@fox.com
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Matthew Stafford connects with Davante Adams for a Los Angeles Rams' two-yard TD vs. Seahawks.
Los Angeles Rams head coach Sean McVay had no time for a question about Matthew Stafford's NFL future following a close NFC Championship loss to the Seattle Seahawks on Sunday.
Stafford, 37, was 22-of-35 for 374 passing yards and three touchdown passes as Los Angeles fell to Seattle 31-27 and missed out on making Super Bowl LX against the New England Patriots.
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Los Angeles Rams head coach Sean McVay talks to quarterback Matthew Stafford (9) during the first half of the NFC Championship NFL football game against the Seattle Seahawks, Sunday, Jan. 25, 2026, in Seattle. (AP Photo/Stephen Brashear)
In the postgame press conference, McVay was asked if he thought Stafford would be back for the 2026 season.
"If he still wants to play. What the hell kind of question is that?" McVay snapped back. "We've been totally present. I know if he wants to, he's still playing at a pretty damn good clip.
"I mean, he's the MVP of the league. If he's not, I mean I got respect for everybody else, but this guy played at a level that's just different."
SUPER BOWL LX: WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT THE GAME
Los Angeles Rams head coach Sean McVay watches from the sideline during the second half of the NFC Championship NFL football game against the Seattle Seahawks, Sunday, Jan. 25, 2026, in Seattle. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)
Stafford and McVay won a Super Bowl with the Rams to cap the 2021 season – his first with the Rams. The team acquired him from the Detroit Lions for Jared Goff with fans thinking he could be retiring soon.
However, he continued to play as one of the top quarterbacks in the league.
He led the NFL with 4,707 passing yards and 46 touchdown passes in 2025. It was the first time he's surpassed 4,000 passing yards and 40 touchdown passes since the 2021 season. He also earned his third Pro Bowl nod.
Los Angeles Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford looks to throw a pass during the first half of the NFC Championship NFL football game against the Seattle Seahawks, Sunday, Jan. 25, 2026, in Seattle. (AP Photo/John Froschauer)
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Los Angeles and the rest of the Rams' faithful will wait to see what Stafford ends up doing.
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Ryan Gaydos is a senior editor for Fox News Digital.
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Minnesotans are rallying for another day of protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement‘s continued operation in the state, after a second protester was killed by federal law enforcement personnel over the weekend.
Residents have been demonstrating despite the frigid temperatures after Alex Pretti was killed by a Border Patrol agent. Pretti was killed during a physical altercation after he had been recording federal operations on his cellphone and had intervened, which resulted in a melee. Now, President Donald Trump is sending “border czar” Tom Homan to Minnesota on Monday night to report directly back to the president on the situation there.
“He has not been involved in that area, but knows and likes many of the people there,” Trump wrote in a post Monday morning. “Tom is tough but fair, and will report directly to me.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Homan going to the city is “good news for peace, safety, and accountability.”
A sit-in at the state capitol is planned for Monday morning in St. Paul, while some University of Minnesota students are staging a walkout at noon and skipping classes, echoing previous actions. Later in the evening, other students are headed to a Twin Cities Hilton hotel, which they believe is housing ICE officers, telling participants to “Get these fascist bastards out of our cities.”
WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT THE FATAL SHOOTING OF ALEX PRETTI IN MINNESOTA
Also on Monday, two courts will consider separate cases that could hold sweeping ramifications for ICE's presence in Minnesota, and the Trump administration's efforts to carry out deportation sweeps in blue states antagonistic to the White House.
At 2 p.m., a federal judge in Saint Paul will hear arguments regarding Minnesota's attempt to access evidence from the latest shooting involving an ICE operation on Saturday. Pretti, 37, died during the incident, prompting more backlash against the Trump administration. Trump weighed in on the case over the weekend, announcing the shooting is under investigation, while expressing concern that Pretti was carrying a gun during anti-ICE protests. He had a lawful carry permit.
There is already a restraining order approved by U.S. District Judge Eric Tostrud that has paused any destruction or alteration of evidence.
In another court hearing, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Menendez is set to consider arguments centered on Minnesota's attempt to end the federal government's “Operation Metro Surge” in the state. ICE says it has removed over 3,000 criminal illegal immigrants, including murderers, rapists, and pedophiles, during the surge, which began in December 2025. Should the state win its case, ICE would face significant restrictions in how it operates in Minnesota, and the surge would be forced to end.
The latest round of protests against ICE in Minnesota, which have, at times, turned violent, began on Jan. 7 when an ICE officer killed Renee Good. Video footage of the deadly shooting sparked sweeping controversy, as the Trump administration said it proved the use of force was justified, and protesters believe that it showed that, at best, ICE grossly mishandled the situation.
The Minnesota Chiefs of Police Association has requested a meeting with Trump and his advisers to discuss public safety in the wake of the unrest.
“Minnesota's law enforcement officers are facing growing challenges in fulfilling their core responsibilities of protecting life, enforcing the law, and serving communities in accordance with constitutional principles,” the MCPA said, according to the Wall Street Journal.
BORDER PATROL AGENTS INVOLVED IN PRETTI SHOOTING REASSIGNED
Dozens of local business leaders have urged Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), and the White House to cooperate and de-escalate tensions. Their concerns come after the state saw extensive damage during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and riots following the death of George Floyd.
“In this difficult moment for our community, we call for peace and focused cooperation among local, state, and federal leaders to achieve a swift and durable solution that enables families, businesses, our employees, and communities across Minnesota to resume our work to build a bright and prosperous future,” 60 CEOs wrote in a letter published over the weekend.
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Max Tucci discusses how his New York City restaurant, Tucci, is offering meals catering to users of weight-loss drugs.
Once known for bottomless breadsticks and supersized meals, American chain restaurants are increasingly rethinking their portion sizes.
As GLP-1 weight-loss medications like Ozempic, Wegovy and Zepbound go mainstream, restaurants are responding to customers with smaller appetites — and a growing appetite for protein-packed meals.
"People on GLP-1s are prioritizing protein because it's the macronutrient that they need to preserve muscle mass," New Jersey-based registered dietitian Jenna Werner told NBC News, adding that restaurants are using "this weight-loss cultural movement to hop on that train."
FAST FOOD GOES GLP-1: SHAKE SHACK JOINS PROTEIN CRAZE WITH NEW OZEMPIC-FRIENDLY MENU
The rapid rise in GLP-1 drugs, which suppress appetite and slow digestion, has coincided with changes across chain menus, from scaled-down portions to snack-sized, high-protein options.
Fast-food chains like Shake Shack and Chipotle are among those that have rolled out high-protein, lower-carb menus, as Fox News Digital previously reported.
American chain restaurants are rethinking portion sizes as diners' appetites change. (iStock)
Meanwhile, Olive Garden introduced a "lighter portion" menu featuring smaller servings at lower prices, Chipotle rolled out a "High Protein Cup," Subway added compact "Protein Pockets," and Smoothie King launched a GLP-1 support menu, according to their websites.
Many GLP-1 users report finding traditional restaurant portions too big.
WHY OZEMPIC USERS 'CAN BARELY FINISH A THIRD' OF THEIR RESTAURANT ORDERS
"Patients consistently report that restaurant portions, which they once found normal-sized, now seem overwhelming," Florida obesity specialist Dr. Fernando Ovalle Jr. previously told Fox News Digital.
"Many tell me they can barely finish a third of their usual order."
Smaller appetites are leaving many diners unable to finish full-sized restaurant portions. (iStock)
New research suggests that when GLP-1 users do dine out, they aren't abandoning restaurants altogether — they're ordering differently.
A January study from Chicago-based research company Circana found that GLP-1 users decreased the average number of items ordered per visit by just 1%, while favoring main dishes over sides.
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The research also showed growing demand for vegetables, fruit and nutrient-dense items like smoothies.
"With GLP-1 usage, the biggest change to restaurants won't be that consumers stop going out to eat, it will be how they go out to eat and what they order," David Portalatin, senior vice president at Circana, said in a statement.
Chipotle debuted a high-protein menu in December, with items ranging from 15 to 81 grams of protein. (Chipotle)
Some restaurateurs say flexibility — not smaller offerings — is the real trend.
"I don't think restaurants are simply 'shrinking' portions," Abraham Merchant, CEO of New York-based Merchants Hospitality, told Fox News Digital.
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"What we're really seeing is more flexibility in how guests want to eat."
Teneshia Murray, owner of Atlanta-based T's Brunch Bar, agreed, telling Fox News Digital customers want "the same flavor but on healthier food items," with more high-protein and lower-carb options, even at soul food restaurants like hers.
Shake Shack's new menu includes bunless burgers that deliver up to 52 grams of protein. (Shake Shack)
Industry experts note that rising food costs, value concerns and broader health trends, including new federal dietary guidelines recommending higher protein intake, are all influencing menus, too.
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But not everyone is on board. Celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay recently blasted the idea of GLP-1-friendly menus, calling them "absolute bulls---" in an interview and vowing not to offer smaller portions at his restaurants.
Yet many chains appear to be betting that lighter, protein-driven and customizable meals are here to stay.
Diners are increasingly choosing vegetables, fruit and nutrient-dense options like smoothies, research shows. (iStock)
"Restaurants that win are the ones offering flexibility," Ovalle said.
Novo Nordisk, the maker of Ozempic and Wegovy, previously told Fox News Digital that it is "humbling to see how Ozempic and Wegovy have already helped so many Americans."
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"We are proud of the work our scientists have done to advance innovation and improve the lives of people with chronic diseases, including diabetes and obesity," a spokesperson added.
A spokesperson for Eli Lilly, the maker of Mounjaro and Zepbound, told NBC that the company values "efforts to make healthy living easier for everyone."
Deirdre Bardolf is a lifestyle writer with Fox News Digital.
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As the Goldwater Institute demands that Idaho's attorney general launch an investigation into a new anti-DEI law, an attorney for the group exposed how four universities in the state have allegedly schemed to sidestep the law's provisions.
As a watchdog demands that Idaho's attorney general launch an investigation into a new anti-DEI law, an attorney for the group exposed how four universities in the state have allegedly schemed to sidestep the law's provisions.
In April, Idaho enacted the Freedom of Inquiry in Higher Education Act, which took effect in July and prohibits institutions of higher learning from forcing students to enroll in mandatory DEI courses that are unrelated to their field of study. Schools are allowed to apply for exemptions for programs of study that are primarily focused on racial, ethnic or gender studies.
But the Goldwater Institute says schools are already attempting to skirt the new regulations.
"The whole goal of this law is to make it so that no one is forced to take mandatory courses that indoctrinate students with these discriminatory ideologies as a condition of graduation in unrelated fields," Parker Jackson, a staff attorney at the Goldwater Institute, told Fox News Digital. "So we're talking about degree programs like social work or counseling or psychology, things that you wouldn't normally think would involve things like critical theory, race and gender studies, ethnic studies."
Homemade and hand-painted signs express a variety of viewpoints in a small group of eight adults within a huge crowd at Union Square. (John Senter/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
UNIVERSITY DROPS JOB POSTING AFTER DEI REQUIREMENT EXPOSED, PROFESSOR SAYS ‘I WOULD NOT BE HIRED' TODAY
The law is meant to ensure that unsuspecting students don't wind up being indoctrinated by DEI programs when they are simply trying to obtain a degree for which DEI is irrelevant.
But the University of Idaho, Boise State University, Idaho State University and Lewis-Clark State College are skirting this law and applying for exceptions for courses that should not be exempt, according to a Goldwater Institute letter sent to Attorney General Raul Labrador asking him to look into the matter.
The letter also questions a memorandum sent to the schools by the Idaho Board of Education just before the law took effect, explaining the new law to the universities. That memorandum misinterprets the law to allow for more exceptions than intended, according to the letter.
"So, the statute specifically says that the exemptions can only be used for courses, the title of which indicates that they're targeted towards these racial or gender or ethnic studies," Jackson explained. "And what the board has did is they've gone through, and they've essentially tried to delete that portion of the statute and say that if the degree program requirements have these DEI mandates in them, then they can get an exemption for the class."
In New York City, members of the National Action Network rallied in support of DEI, diversity, equity and inclusion, on August 14, 2025. (Deb Cohn-Orbach/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
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According to Jackson, that is a perversion of the law.
"Well, that's kind of circular. They can't just avoid the mandate against these requirements by creating the requirements," said Jackson. "And so, what we're asking the attorney general to do is to take a look at all of these exemptions that the board has granted across the state at Boise State and Idaho State and University of Idaho — I think Lewis-Clarke College — Lewis-Clarke State College is the other one, and find that these are violations of the Freedom of Inquiry in Higher Education Act."
The letter also says that the schools now require DEI-related courses in degree programs whose titles do not clearly indicate a primary focus on racial, ethnic or gender studies.
For example, a required course in the sociology program at the University of Idaho is called "Introduction to Inequity and Justice." The school has received a DEI exemption for the sociology program because of this course and several other elective courses, despite the fact that the degree program, sociology, is not explicitly a race, ethnic or gender studies program.
LEAKED UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LECTURE MATERIAL BLAMES TRUMP FOR 'WHITE SUPREMACY,' EMBRACES FAR-LEFT ACTIVISM
People participate in the Boise Pride Festival parade along River Street in Boise, Idaho, on Sept. 7, 2025. (Sarah A. Miller/The Idaho Statesman/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
"Stated simply, DEI-related courses may not be mandated unless the title of the degree program (e.g., ethnic studies) clearly establishes that the degree program itself is primarily focused on racial, ethnic, or gender studies," the letter says. "Only then may the institution require a DEI-related course for completion of the degree program. By omitting the title requirement, the guidance mischaracterizes which programs are eligible for an exemption under the Act, making exemptions available for a much broader category of degree programs."
The letter ends with a call to action, asking Labrador to investigate the exceptions that have been made, and the memorandum sent by the Board of Education to the schools.
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"Taxpayers shouldn't be on the hook for funding left-wing activism and indoctrination," said Jackson. "And that's part of the goal of these laws that are starting to be passed throughout the country is not only protecting students that are unsuspecting — they're just trying to go get a job and get qualified for their jobs — from this type of political indoctrination, but it's also protecting taxpayers."
"Let students go and be social work students and become psychologists and counselors without having this radical, toxic political ideology shoved down their throats."
The University of Idaho, Lewis-Clark State College and Idaho State University directed Fox News Digital to the Idaho Board of Education.
"The Office of the Idaho State Board of Education will cooperate fully with the Idaho Attorney General's Office," a spokesperson for the board told Fox News Digital. "The Office cannot comment further at this time."
Boise State University did not return a request for comment.
Peter D'Abrosca is a reporter at Fox News Digital covering campus extremism in higher education.
Follow Peter on X at @pmd_reports. Send story tips to peter.dabrosca@fox.com.
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Skeleton athlete Katie Uhlaender says she should have been going to the 2026 Olympics in Italy next month. As a veteran of five Winter Games from 2006 to 2022, sliding in Turin, Vancouver, Sochi, PyeongChang and Beijing, the American would have made history by competing in a sixth.
What denied her entry to the Milan-Cortina Olympics was her final qualification event in the North American Cup earlier this month at Lake Placid, where several Canadian competitors were withdrawn at the last minute. Despite Uhlaender winning the race, the sudden reduction in the number of athletes competing had reduced the amount of qualification points available, leaving her just short.
Uhlaender accused the Canadian team and its coach, Joe Cecchini, of intentionally withdrawing the athletes, deliberately manipulating the field to benefit one of their own sliders' bids for qualification.
Bobsleigh Canada Skeleton denied anything untoward, telling CNN Sports in a statement, “BCS remains confident that its actions were appropriate, transparent, and aligned with both athlete welfare and the integrity of the sport.” Cecchini didn't respond to CNN Sports' request for comment.
Skeleton's governing body also dismissed Uhlaender's complaint, but she wasn't the only athlete to have been negatively impacted at Lake Placid and, since then, an increasing number of national teams have rallied behind her.
“The only thing that brings me warmth in my heart, and hope – and lit a fire under my butt that you could equate to the Olympic flame – is that my community is coming together,” Uhlaender told CNN Sports. “We're trying to be heard.”
The Lake Placid incident has thrown skeleton into turmoil. The International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation (IBSF) quickly dismissed Uhlaender's complaints after its Interim Integrity Unit ruled that Cecchini had not breached its rules, code of conduct or code of ethics. Uhlaender accuses the governing body of a flawed investigation and that evidence or testimony from the athletes competing in Lake Placid was never considered.
“It saddens me that they didn't respond to my email with the evidence,” Uhlaender explained. “They didn't reach out to any of the affected parties, not even afterwards, to make sure anyone was okay, and it makes the community feel isolated from the governance. I think this is an opportunity for us to all come together.”
The day after the judgment was posted, Elisabeth Vathje, Executive Committee Member and Co-Chairperson of the Athlete Council within IBSF, resigned her position over what she described in an Instagram post as “a misalignment of values.”
Citing the “reputational harm” to their sport, at least a dozen competing nations have thrown their weight behind Uhlaender, and the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) has asked the International Olympic Committee's new president Kirsty Coventry and the IBSF to grant Uhlaender a wild card place at the Olympics. At stake, they argue, are the values upon which the Olympic movement was founded.
In the letter seen by CNN Sports, Rocky Harris, USOPC's Chief of Sport and Athlete Services, wrote, “‘Ms. Uhlaender is the epitome of what it means to be an Olympian and truly embodies the Olympic spirit. … Allowing her to compete in Milano Cortina will deter others from engaging in unsporting conduct and ensure fair competition.”
In support of their athlete, USA Bobsled Skeleton made a similar plea. “Granting Katie Uhlaender the opportunity to compete in Milano Cortina,” wrote CEO Aron McGuire, “would send a powerful message that dedication, character, and lifelong commitment to the values of the Games matter.”
If she had come up short in Lake Placid, Uhlaender says she would have retired immediately. She's been recovering from hip surgery and limping through the season, almost quitting after the World Championships last March. She says that many of her fellow athletes who were there, including Janine Flock and Kim Bos, told her to keep going. She's still training now, hoping in the next two weeks to somehow find a pathway to the Games, but she insists that she's motivated by more than just personal gain.
“It was never about getting into the Olympics, it was about standing up for the integrity of the sport,” she said. “I have to emphasize that when I see the younger generation witnessing competition manipulation like some are trying to justify it, ‘through the rules,' it concerns me because, if we didn't speak out and show that people care about the integrity of the sport and ethics, they might just fall in line and behave that way.
“I don't want Canada to have a bad reputation; I'm hoping that we don't treat any (athlete) in this situation like an enemy. We treat them like a part of our community and try to show them that the better way forward is sticking together and being transparent and honest.”
Uhlaender is now hoping US Vice President JD Vance, who is leading the nation's delegation to Milan-Cortina, will take her case to the International Olympic Committee and persuade the organization of its merits.
She says she feels it's important the US sets an example, particularly given that her country will host the 2028 Summer Olympics in LA and the 2029 World Championships and the 2034 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.
It's not lost on Uhlaender that one of the first nations to support her cause was Denmark, whose government is currently at loggerheads with the US over the fate of Greenland.
“At moments such as this, the Olympic Movement has an opportunity, and a responsibility, to reaffirm its core values,” wrote Carsten P. Wulf, President of Bob & Skeleton Denmark to the IOC. “Our sport needs this. Our athletes want this. And the Olympic Movement would be strengthened by it.”
“I think that this is a great opportunity to show that we really do care about one another more than is portrayed in politics because we're all human,” Uhlaender said. “If people don't fight to uphold those values and keep them alive, then politics will eat us up. We want to support the ethics and integrity of sport; sometimes, the good guys can win.”
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The European Union has launched a wide-reaching investigation into Elon Musk's Grok chatbot on X following global outrage over its ability to generate sexually explicit images, including of children.
The scandal erupted at the end of last year when the AI chatbot churned out a barrage of digitally undressed images of women and children in response to requests from users.
The global outcry that followed was met by an initial announcement by X that the tool would be limited to paying subscribers, but the company eventually prevented all users from using Grok to create images of real people in revealing clothing.
The European Commission, the EU's executive arm, said in a statement Monday that the investigation would examine whether X “properly assessed and mitigated risks associated with the deployment of Grok's functionalities into X in the EU.”
Henna Virkkunen, a senior commission official focusing on technology, as well security and democracy, said in the statement: “Sexual deepfakes of women and children are a violent, unacceptable form of degradation. With this investigation, we will determine whether X has met its legal obligations… or whether it treated rights of European citizens – including those of women and children – as collateral damage of its service.”
When contacted for comment, X referred CNN to a January 14 statement on its social media platform that said among other things: “We take action to remove high-priority violative content, including Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) and non-consensual nudity, taking appropriate action against accounts that violate our X rules. We also report accounts seeking Child Sexual Exploitation materials to law enforcement authorities as necessary.”
After days of outrage, X restricts Grok's ability to create explicit images
In a briefing for journalists, another European Commission official acknowledged the measures taken by X so far but said the company had not properly assessed the risks before launching the chatbot.
The probe was opened under the EU's Digital Services Act, which requires Big Tech companies to do more to tackle illegal and harmful online content.
There is no timeline for completing the probe nor any indication of what action the European Commision might take based on its findings. However, the official, who asked to remain anonymous, told journalists the body had “quite a few tools at our disposal” and that a fine was possible.
“What we are after is changing the platform's behavior,” they said.
The EU hit the social media platform with a fine of around $140 million in December, saying the “deceptive design” of its blue verification checkmark and other features violated the Digital Services Act. At the time, Musk called the fine “crazy.”
When asked whether the fine had been paid, the unnamed EU official said it had not but that the company still had time to settle it.
Earlier this month, California Attorney General Rob Bonta also announced an investigation into the “proliferation of non-consensual sexually explicit material produced using Grok.”
Grok is still banned in Indonesia and Malaysia as a result of the image generation controversy. UK regulator Ofcom has also launched a formal investigation into X.
Hadas Gold and Claire Duffy contributed to this report, which has been updated with additional details and background.
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Harvard University student Tejas Billa tells Fox News Digital that the university's alleged left-leaning bias in its academics isolates some students on campus.
Harvard isn't supposed to be chasing. It's supposed to be leading.
Yet a new global ranking put out by Holland's Leiden University — a measure of the number and importance of research publications — has Harvard down to third place worldwide, and both institutions ahead of it are Chinese. It gets worse for America: in the top 20, Harvard and the University of Michigan are the only U.S. universities. China takes 16 of the top 20 slots.
Unlike many such university lists, this ranking isn't a reputational beauty contest, but a statistical analysis based on publication data. In other words, it's one way of measuring what a research university is supposed to do: produce serious scholarship at scale.
So, if the most famous university in the world is sliding — and if China is dominating the top of the table — we should stop handwaving about "globalization" and start asking what, exactly, has gone wrong in American academia.
HARVARD STUDENT SAYS POLITICAL BIASES ON CAMPUS ARE 'SYSTEMATIC' AFTER ALAN GARBER ADMITS FACULTY 'WENT WRONG' BY PUSHING BELIEFS IN THE CLASSROOM
Harvard is declining in the rankings of top research universities, because Chinese universities focus on research, not the woke agenda. (Photo by Aaron M. Sprecher/Getty Images)
The answer is not that Americans suddenly got dumber. It's that our universities have become less serious.
The center of gravity on many campuses has shifted in recent years from truth-seeking, merit and education to DEI, identity and activism. That dynamic shows up everywhere that matters for research production: hiring, teaching and the basic culture of inquiry.
Hiring increasingly rewards ideological compliance rather than intellectual excellence. Diversity statements and "commitment" litmus tests have become routine. Whole searches are designed to narrow the acceptable range of viewpoints and methodologies. When a university hires activists who happen to hold PhDs instead of scholars who happen to hold opinions, it should not be surprised when scholarship suffers.
HARVARD PRESIDENT CRITICIZES FACULTY ACTIVISM, CLAIMS UNIVERSITY BRINGING OBJECTIVITY BACK TO CLASSROOM
Teaching has been reduced, in too many places, to therapeutic affirmation and political mobilization. Students get more indoctrination than instruction, producing graduates who aren't equipped with the writing, numeracy and disciplinary rigor needed to power the next generation of research and innovation.
Research culture has become timid and conformist. Entire categories of questions are treated as morally impermissible to even ask. But real research requires risk: contesting assumptions, poking sacred cows and following the evidence wherever it leads. A campus that punishes dissent will eventually punish discovery.
And hovering over all of this is the growth of the diversicratic state: offices, trainings, compliance regimes, "bias response" systems and an endless paper trail that consumes money and time. Universities can call it "inclusion" all they want; functionally, it's overhead, which is the enemy of productivity. In a previous Fox News piece, I argued that elite American institutions won't just fix themselves because the incentives inside these places run toward ideology and away from excellence.
Meanwhile, China has been building research capacity like a state project — because it is one. It funds labs, scales programs, recruits talent and measures success in outputs that translate into technological and geopolitical power.
HARVARD DEAN REMOVED AFTER ANTI-WHITE, ANTI-POLICE SOCIAL MEDIA POSTS RESURFACED
Even 10 years ago, this contrast was stark. In the 2015 Leiden rankings, U.S. institutions dominated the top 20, with MIT, Harvard and Caltech at the top. That's not ancient history, but within the careers of almost all current university officials.
Demonstrators take part in an "Emergency Rally: Stand with Palestinians Under Siege in Gaza," amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas, at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., Oct. 14, 2023. (Brian Snyder/REUTERS)
At the same time, institutional leaders that lecture Americans about "democracy" have been disturbingly casual about foreign cash, which typically comes with strings.
The federal government has repeatedly had to investigate universities for failures to disclose foreign gifts and contracts. In 2020, for example, the Department of Education investigated Harvard and Yale over potential failures to report large sums of foreign funding; Department of Education (DoE) records showed billions in foreign gifts from countries including Qatar and China. Last April, an executive order intended to remedy foreign influence noted that DoE investigations led universities to disclose $6.5 billion in previously undisclosed foreign funds.
And it's not just money. U.S. law enforcement and congressional investigators have warned for years about programs designed to exploit America's open research environment. The FBI describes Chinese "talent plans" as often incentivizing one-way transfers of research and intellectual property, sometimes through undisclosed affiliations and contracts. A Senate investigation similarly detailed how China's talent recruitment programs were designed to extract research and expertise from the United States to advance China's national goals.
The bottom line is simple: America's universities are being outcompeted abroad while being hollowed out at home. If we want to reclaim research leadership, we need to reclaim the university's purpose by doing at least four things:
Research culture has become timid and conformist. Entire categories of questions are treated as morally impermissible to even ask.
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Harvard's slip in the Leiden ranking isn't a quirky statistic, but a warning light. China is surging because it's focused on research, development and education. America is slipping because our universities have too often swapped those priorities for DEI bureaucracy, identity politics, and activism.
We can reverse this. But first we have to admit we have a problem.
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Ilya Shapiro is the director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. He is also author of the "Lawless: The Miseducation of America's Elites" and writes the Shapiro's Gavel newsletter on Substack.
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Dozens of CEOs have called for the lowering of tensions in Minneapolis, pleading for a return to normalcy in the aftermath of anti-ICE protester Alex Pretti being fatally shot by a Border Patrol agent.
The 60 business leaders called for cooperation between Mayor Jacob Frey, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), and the Trump administration. The letter was published by the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce and signed by the CEOs of companies and organizations such as Target, UnitedHealth Group, U.S. Bancorp, Minnesota's professional sports teams, the Mayo Clinic, and Land O'Lakes, among others.
“The business community in Minnesota prides itself in providing leadership and solving problems to ensure a strong and vibrant state,” read the letter. “The recent challenges facing our state have created widespread disruption and tragic loss of life. For the past several weeks, representatives of Minnesota's business community have been working every day behind the scenes with federal, state, and local officials to advance real solutions.”
“These efforts have included close communication with the Governor, the White House, the Vice President, and local mayors,” the CEOs wrote. “There are ways for us to come together to foster progress.”
The CEOs encouraged all parties to work together to find “real solutions” in the aftermath of the shooting. They each called for peace and expressed their desire to “build a bright and prosperous future.”
“With yesterday's tragic news, we are calling for an immediate deescalation of tensions and for state, local, and federal officials to work together to find real solutions,” read the letter.
SCHIFF SAYS HE'S NOT GIVING ICE OR BORDER PATROL ‘ANOTHER DIME' AFTER PRETTI SHOOTING
“In this difficult moment for our community, we call for peace and focused cooperation among local, state, and federal leaders to achieve a swift and durable solution that enables families, businesses, our employees, and communities across Minnesota to resume our work to build a bright and prosperous future,” noted the CEOs.
Pretti was killed on Saturday during a confrontation with Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis who were conducting illegal immigration enforcement operations. He is the third person to be shot in Minneapolis this month by federal law enforcement officers during such an activity. Renee Good, a 37-year-old resident of Minneapolis, was fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer on Jan. 7, as the agency was engaged in enforcement activities.
When news breaks, you need to understand what actually matters. At Vox, our mission is to help you make sense of the world — and that work has never been more vital. But we can't do it on our own.
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Plaintiffs from the religious right are asking the Republican justices to seize control of public schools.
The Supreme Court is currently considering whether the Constitution requires public schools to out transgender students to their parents, even when those students inform the school that they do not want their family to be informed of their gender identity. The case, which is currently pending on the Court's shadow docket, is known as Mirabelli v. Bonta.
California law provides that public school employees “shall not be required to disclose any information related to a pupil's sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression to any other person without the pupil's consent unless otherwise required by state or federal law.” The plaintiffs in Mirabelli argue that this law is unconstitutional, and they ask the justices to embrace a trial judge's claim that “when gender incongruence is observed…parents have a right to be informed.”
Get the latest developments on the US Supreme Court from senior correspondent Ian Millhiser.
The Mirabelli plaintiffs, in other words, claim that the Constitution requires the government to side with parents in an internal family dispute with their own children. When a public school student wants to keep their trans identity secret from their parents, these plaintiffs argue, government employees are constitutionally required to defy the child's wishes and inform the parents regardless.
Nor is Mirabelli an isolated case. While Mirabelli sits on the Court's shadow docket (a forum for expedited matters that the justices often decide without explaining why they ruled the way they did), the Court is also weighing whether to hear a nearly identical case, known as Foote v. Ludlow School Committee on its merits docket (unlike shadow docket cases, the justices typically release a published opinion explaining why they ruled the way they did in merits docket cases). Last year, Justice Samuel Alito complained in a third case that, in his view, too many lower courts are avoiding the question of “whether a school district violates parents' fundamental rights” when they permit a transgender student to socially transition.
Off the Court, the Federalist Society, the powerful legal group with close ties to the Republican justices, hosted a debate at its most recent national convention on whether “parents have a constitutional right to know and consent to public school facilitation of their children's gender-identity transition.”
This question, in other words, is clearly a matter of great importance to the conservative legal movement's religious wing. And the Supreme Court's Republican majority rarely breaks with the religious right on its high-priority issues.
It is inevitable that public school teachers, and the officials who write the curricula taught by public school teachers, will shape the moral beliefs of their students. Indeed, the Supreme Court historically viewed this reality as a good thing. As the Court said in 1979, one of the public school system's most important functions is to “inculcat[e] fundamental values necessary to the maintenance of a democratic political system.”
To the extent that Americans disagree about which values these schools should teach, the United States has historically managed these disagreements by giving the lion's share of control over public schools to state governments and local school boards. A school in rural Arkansas may teach different books than a school in Manhattan. And that's okay.
Lawsuits like Mirabelli and Foote, by contrast, seek to centralize control over public schools in a Supreme Court dominated by conservative Republicans. And those six Republicans recently showed that they are very eager to become superintendents of the entire nation's public schools.
Until very recently, federal courts firmly rejected the idea that courts should micromanage how public schools teach and relate to their students — largely due to concerns that schools would find it impossible to function if they were subject to such management. In a 1948 opinion, for example, Justice Robert Jackson wrote that there were “256 separate and substantial religious bodies” within the United States, and warned that “if we are to eliminate everything that is objectionable to any of these warring sects or inconsistent with any of their doctrines, we will leave public education in shreds.”
This hands-off era came to an abrupt halt last June, however, with the Supreme Court's decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor (2025).
In Mahmoud, the Court's Republican majority held that parents who object to books with LGBTQ+ characters or themes must be informed if those books will be used in their child's classroom, and given a chance to opt their child out of that lesson. But the opinion speaks in broad terms, suggesting that any parent who objects to any lesson on religious grounds must be given this right — even if the school district could not possibly have known about the parent's objection in advance.
Among other things, Mahmoud is likely to impose a “Don't Say Gay” regime on public schools throughout the country. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in dissent, many school districts “cannot afford to engage in costly litigation over opt-out rights or to divert resources to tracking and managing student absences.” And so their only practical option will be to “censor their curricula” to remove material that might trigger a religious objection from anyone.
Mahmoud, in other words, fundamentally reshaped the relationship between public schools and the judiciary, forcing judges to police schools for any lesson that might trouble any person's religious beliefs. And, as Mirabelli and similar cases show, advocates for the religious right are already demanding more from their allies on the Supreme Court.
Justice Jackson's warning about “leaving public education in shreds” was rooted in the Court's longstanding belief that public schools are an essential institution, and that the Constitution must be interpreted in a way that allows this institution to thrive.
As the Court said six years later in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), its most famous intervention in state education policy, “education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments” — and not just because it prepares children to hold a job as adults, but also because it enables people to be good Americans who contribute to the collective project of the nation. Public schools, the Court explained in Brown, lay “the very foundation of good citizenship.” They enable citizens to perform “our most basic public responsibilities.” And they “awaken[] the child to cultural values” that schools seek to inculcate in all Americans.
This is why modern-day public schools typically teach texts like the Declaration of Independence, with its statement that “all men are created equal,” or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I Have a Dream” speech. These texts are a kind of secular liturgy, taught to all Americans in the hope that we will all embrace liberal democratic values.
Indeed, before Mahmoud, the Court's conservative wing had historically been even more protective of public schools' role as evangelists of universal American values than more liberal justices. Consider, for example, Ambach v. Norwick (1979), where a 5-4 Court upheld a New York state law that prohibited noncitizens from being public school teachers unless they were actively trying to become citizens. The five most conservative justices who served at the time formed the majority.
Those five justices reasoned that, because training children to be good US citizens is one of the most important functions of public schools, the schools could refuse to hire teachers who are uninterested in US citizenship. Public schools, Justice Lewis Powell wrote for the Court, are an “‘assimilative force' by which diverse and conflicting elements in our society are brought together on a broad but common ground.” Hence Powell's conclusion that public schools “inculcat[e] fundamental values necessary to the maintenance of a democratic political system.”
Given the high regard the Supreme Court used to hold for public education, it used to avoid reading the Constitution in ways that would undermine public schools' ability to function. In Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969), for example, the Court famously declared that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” Yet it also held that those rights must yield when they disrupt teachers' ability to educate.
Under Tinker, a public school student may not claim First Amendment protection when their speech “materially disrupts classwork or involves substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others.” The justices recognized that public schools could not function if students had a right to disrupt lessons, so they carefully crafted a rule that respects student free speech without undercutting the school's ability to teach math, history, or American values.
Mahmoud is incompatible with this more modest approach to judging. Much like a school that teaches the Declaration of Independence in order to foster American values like universal equality, the school district in Mahmoud said that it wanted its curriculum to include some books with LGBTQ+ characters in order to showcase American values such as “the richness of cultural pluralism and commonality.”
But it was this very effort to, in Ambach's words, inculcate children in “fundamental values” that the Republican justices found objectionable in Mahmoud. According to Justice Samuel Alito's majority opinion, the LGBTQ-themed books were unacceptable precisely because they were “designed to present certain values and beliefs as things to be celebrated.”
The holding of Mahmoud, moreover, was extraordinarily broad. It seems to say that all public schools must notify parents in advance if they plan to teach a lesson that those parents object to on religious grounds, and that the school must also allow the parents to opt their child out of that lesson.
But, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent, this rule will create “chaos” in public schools because it is not possible for schools to anticipate every objection that a parent might raise, and to warn them in advance. In previous court cases, parents raised religious objections to lessons touching on topics as varied as divorce, interfaith couples, “immodest dress,” evolution, pacifism, magic, women achieving things outside of the home, and “false views of death.” How is a school that wants to teach, say, a biography of President Ronald Reagan supposed to know, in advance, if one of its students' parents finds this book objectionable because Reagan was divorced?
In criticizing Mahmoud, I want to be clear that I do not object to the Court's conclusion that classroom instruction on sensitive topics like sexuality may sometimes violate the Constitution's religious protections. The problem with Mahmoud is that it imposes an impossible burden on public schools, requiring them to anticipate any religious view that might be held by any parent. What the Court should have done instead is the exact same thing it did in Tinker: craft a legal rule that respects constitutional rights without undermining public schools' ability to function.
But the kind of conservatism that respects institutions like public schools is no longer present on the Supreme Court. It's been replaced by a conservatism that fetishizes the interests of the religious right.
So what, then, does Mahmoud mean for Mirabelli, and for other cases where religious conservatives want to control public schools? The short answer is that Mahmoud is a very helpful case for the Mirabelli plaintiffs. If the Constitution requires teachers to tell parents if they plan to teach a book with a trans character, why wouldn't it also require them to tell a student's parents if the student says they are trans?
One possible answer, as the appeals court that heard Mirabelli concluded, is that Mahmoud applies only to “curricular requirements” and not to “general operational policies that involve no instruction.”
At the Federalist Society's debate on whether public schools must out trans children, University of Chicago law professor Mary Anne Case argued extending Mahmoud beyond a school's curriculum would be even more disruptive than Mahmoud itself.
“Many parents have extremely strong religious ethical views about the foods a child consumes,” Case pointed out. If a child's parent wants their family to only eat kosher or halal food, does that mean that the school must immediately inform the parents if their child is caught with a piece of bacon? If a parent wants their child to wear “religious garb,” is the school supposed to monitor that child to make sure that they do not remove a hijab or a yarmulke? Similarly, if a child holds different religious views than their parents, is the school required to warn the parents if that student wears a headscarf, a kippah, or a cross necklace at school?
If a parent believes, for religious reasons, that their child should not form romantic attachments prior to marriage, are teachers obligated to tell the child's parents if they are dating someone? What if the student is gay, and the parents object to homosexuality? Are schools required to reveal that information as well? And, what happens if teachers reasonably believe that the parents may be abusive? If a student tells their teacher that they are scared because their father will beat them or kick them out of the house if he discovers that they are trans, does the Constitution really require this teacher to out the student?
Unfortunately, it's unlikely that any of these arguments will persuade this Supreme Court — the Republican justices already revealed in Mahmoud that they do not care if their approach to religious liberty forces public schools to do the impossible. But there is another reason why Mirabelli is different from Mahmoud that could be more persuasive to this Court.
As the appeals court that ruled against the Mirabelli plaintiffs noted, “the challenged policies appear to apply only when a student makes the voluntary decision to share their gender nonconformity with the school.” The Mahmoud opinion has very little to say about the right of students to express themselves or form their own beliefs, possibly because that case primarily dealt with younger students who may not yet have formed opinions on gender or sexuality.
But when a child tells their teacher that they are transgender, and that they do not want their parents to know this fact about them, that child is asserting their own right to self-definition. They are also implicitly asserting a religious belief. A child who tells a teacher that they are trans, and that they do not want their parents to know because of their parents' anti-trans religious views, is exercising their constitutional right to hold religious beliefs that are different from their parents'.
The heart of the Mirabelli plaintiffs' claim is that a parent's right to exercise their religion trumps the right of the child to exercise theirs. But the Constitution provides that all people, parents and children alike, may freely exercise their faith.
Mirabelli is rooted in a fairly explicit vision of parents as domineering figures who control all aspects of their children's lives, even against the wishes of those very children. And the Mirabelli plaintiffs claim that the Constitution obligates the government to enforce parental domination. At one point, their brief even quotes a dissenting opinion from Justice Clarence Thomas, which argues that minors should be stripped of their First Amendment rights because “the concept of total parental control over children's lives extended into the schools.”
Accordingly, the plaintiffs' most radical legal argument is rooted in an old Supreme Court precedent that they read to say that parents have a “right of control” over their children.
It is true that, more than a century ago, the Supreme Court handed down two cases — Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) and Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925) — that held that parents enjoy some amount of “liberty” to “direct the upbringing and education of children.” But those cases involved far more modest legal claims than the one in Mirabelli. In Meyer, the Court struck down a Nebraska law that forbade teachers at private schools from teaching foreign languages prior to the eighth grade. And in Pierce, the Court struck down an Oregon law that forbade most parents from sending their kids to a private school altogether.
If Meyer and Pierce were decided today, the Court most likely would reach the same result, but for very different reasons. A ban on teaching foreign languages obviously violates the First Amendment's free speech protections. And the Oregon law struck down in Pierce was almost certainly motivated by anti-Catholic sentiment and a desire to ban parochial schools, and thus violates the Constitution's guarantee that everyone may practice their faith.
But the Supreme Court's approach to individual rights was completely haphazard in the 1920s, and it paid no heed to the text of the Constitution. The Court frequently made up “rights” that do not appear in the Constitution, such as a “freedom of contract” that was frequently used to strike down laws protecting workers. Meanwhile, textually protected rights such as free speech more or less did not exist in the 1920s, at least according to the Supreme Court.
Yet, while the Supreme Court largely repudiated this anti-textual approach to constitutional interpretation in the 1930s, Meyer and Pierce remain good law. So the Mirabelli plaintiffs are correct that, under current law, parents do enjoy some amount of “liberty” to raise their children as they choose. But neither case — both of which merely said that parents may send their children to private schools which may teach different subjects or instill different values than public schools — has ever permitted parents to control how public schools operate.
Parents, of course, have a near-absolute right to decide which values they wish to teach their own children. But it is neither possible, nor desirable, for a family to completely insulate its children from other value systems and ideas. And the fundamental question presented by cases like Mirabelli is whether American society as a whole should also play a role in shaping public school students' values. If a family wishes to teach its children that pluralistic democratic values are wicked, are public schools forbidden from teaching an alternative viewpoint?
Before Mahmoud, the judiciary's answer to this question was an emphatic “no.” Disagreements about which values should be taught in public schools were dealt with democratically, through elections for state legislature or local school boards. But a family that wants to teach their children that, say, white people are inherently superior to Black people, couldn't sue their local school board because they don't want their child to read To Kill a Mockingbird.
Litigants like the Mirabelli plaintiffs reject this kind of federalized pluralism as well. The fundamental premise of their lawsuit is that control over public education should be transferred from state and local authorities to Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. They want a one-size-fits-all approach to education — just so long as the one size is selected by Republicans in the nation's capitol.
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Gen. Zhang Youxia, vice chairman of China's Central Military Commission attends the opening session of the National People's Congress (NPC) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, Wednesday, March 5, 2025. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan, File)
Gen. Zhang Youxia, vice chairman of China's Central Military Commission attends the opening session of the National People's Congress (NPC) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, Wednesday, March 5, 2025. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan, File)
BEIJING (AP) — China made a major announcement over the weekend, saying it was investigating the army's top general for suspected serious violations of discipline and law.
Gen. Zhang Youxia was the highest military member just below President Xi Jinping.
The Defense Ministry said Saturday that authorities were investigating Zhang, the senior of the two vice chairs of the powerful Central Military Commission, China's top military body, and Gen. Liu Zhenli, a lower member of the commission who was in charge of the military's Joint Staff Department.
The move shakes up virtually the entire commission, chaired by Xi, leaving only one of its six members intact.
“Xi Jinping has completed one of the biggest purges of China's military leadership in the history of the People's Republic,” said Neil Thomas, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute's Center for China Analysis.
For the army and China in general, the full impact of the changes is still unknown. But some experts say the moves also might have repercussions on Beijing's next move on Taiwan, the self-ruled island that Beijing claims as its own territory.
Here are some elements to understand why Gen. Zhang's removal is important.
The Defense Ministry announced the measures Saturday but provided no details on the alleged wrongdoing. The next day, the People's Liberation Army Daily published an editorial that fell short of explaining the specific reasons, saying only that it was “for suspected serious violations of discipline and law” and showed China's commitment to punish corruption. That is something Xi has pursued since the early days of his presidency.
Rumors have circulated on social media and there have been some media reports about the changes, but nothing official.
“I do not believe any evidence publicly released or selectively leaked by Chinese authorities would necessarily reflect the core reason for Zhang's removal,” said K. Tristan Tang, nonresident Vasey Fellow at Pacific Forum. “The critical point is that Xi Jinping decided to move against Zhang; once an investigation is launched, problems are almost inevitably uncovered.”
Analysts have said the purges are designed to reform the military and ensure loyalty to Xi. They are part of a broader anti-corruption drive that has resulted in punishment for more than 200,000 officials since the Chinese leader came to power in 2012.
Before Zhang and Liu's dismissal, the Communist Party expelled the other vice chair of the commission, He Weidong, in October. He was replaced with Zhang Shengmin, who is now the only commission member.
Since 2012, at least 17 Generals from the People's Liberation Army, or PLA, have been removed from their military positions, among them eight who were former top commission members, according to a review of military statements and state media reports made by The Associated Press.
Some think the removals could have repercussions for China's decisions on Taiwan, but it is far from clear.
China considers Taiwan its own territory and has threatened to take control of the island by force if necessary. China also has increased military pressure and, last month, launched large-scale military drills around Taiwan for two days after the U.S. government announced a major arms sales to Taiwan.
Thomas, from the Asia Society Policy Institute, said the latest purge “makes China's threat toward Taiwan weaker in the short term but stronger in the long term.”
It would make a military escalation against the island riskier in the immediate term because of “a high command in disarray,” but in the long term would mean the army has a more loyal and less corrupt leadership with more military capabilities, he said.
Asked if this might reinforce the idea that removing top military brass might show China is not ready for war, Tang from the Pacific Forum said it “does not fundamentally change that assessment”.
“That said,” he added, “I also do not believe the PLA's combat readiness has been severely disrupted.”
With the recent changes, the military commission will operate with only one of six members active and Xi at the top as the chair.
The PLA's Daily editorial said that after the actions against Zhang and Liu, the party is moving to “promote the rejuvenation of the People's Liberation Army, and inject powerful momentum into building a strong military force.”
But it's not clear if the five vacant positions will be replaced soon or if Xi will wait until 2027, when there will be a selection of a new Communist Party Central Committee, the body in charge of also appointing the new military commission members.
Tang, from the Pacific Forum, doesn't see any pressure on Xi to fill the positions in the short term.
“Unless the objective is to create an internal counterweight to Zhang Shengmin,” the only current member in the commission, he said.
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It has recently been a bad stretch for President Donald Trump, perhaps the worst of his second term. But recent polls showing a bump in support from Hispanic voters might offer a path forward.
The latest Emerson College survey has Trump's approval rate surging among Hispanic voters. Emerson found that 43.3% of Hispanics approved of the president's performance, up 15 points from last month. Results from the latest New York Times/Siena poll show a similar movement, with Trump's standing among Hispanics rising by 13 points since December.
One explanation is that Hispanics enthusiastically support the Trump administration's recent capture of Venezuela's tyrant, Nicolas Maduro. A new Morning Consult poll found that 66% of Hispanics supported the move, the highest level of approval of any racial group. White people, for example, supported the president's decision at 64%. The triumphant military operation saw elite U.S. commandos dive into the heart of a foreign country and snatch a dictator and enemy of America without suffering a single loss. It's no surprise that such an exhibition of strength and competence would play well with voters.
The public has become increasingly skeptical of foreign interventions in recent years, but they like to win. Hispanic people are no exception.
Trump's efforts to secure the border and crack down on drug trafficking and violent crime have also received favorable support in this demographic group. Under the Biden administration, America's southern border became a playground for narcoterrorist organizations, with predictable results. Americans of all ethnicities became less safe as their communities deteriorated.
Trump has restored sovereignty, worked to seal the border, and taken the fight to the doorstep of those who peddle the poison that kills thousands of Americans. The status quo was neither working nor sustainable, and the public knew it.
Unsurprisingly, a majority supports securing the border. So, too, do the Hispanic voters who have played a key role in Trump's political fortunes.
In 2024, Trump received a record share of their votes at 43%. While not as high as his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, this is a higher percentage than any Republican candidate in modern history, and an 8-point increase from 2020. It could be the start of something big for Trump and the Republican Party, possibly giving both a needed boost as they look ahead to a difficult midterm.
For decades, the Republican Party has sought to attract Latinos and other minority voters who had long been part of the Democratic coalition. George W. Bush, for example, made a concerted effort to bring Hispanics into the tent, seeking to use immigration reform and other measures to do so. Trump's approach has been altogether different.
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He has sought to remake the Republican Party as the champion of the working class, willing to address the “root cause” of illegal immigration. This has been key to winning over voters whom the Democratic Party took for granted.
Bringing them into the GOP alone won't be enough to bring the party victoriously across the finish line. Its fate will hinge on the economy and prices, as voters will hold the ruling party accountable. But Trump's rebalancing of relations with Latin America, which includes toppling Maduro and deporting illegal immigrants who taint legal immigrants, can be an element in winning Hispanic votes next November. If Trump can lower the cost of living, he will likely hold his gains among Hispanics.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping's decision to place the country's top-ranking general under investigation is a stunning move that leaves Xi virtually alone at the top of the military hierarchy – raising deep questions about the implications for the world's largest armed forces, as well as Beijing's ambitions to take control of Taiwan.
But the purge also makes one thing clear: Xi sees no target as too big to be taken down as he remakes the military according to his vision – and prioritizes loyalty over all else.
The investigations into Zhang Youxia, a battle-tested, seasoned military commander and longtime Xi ally, and Liu Zhenli, who heads People's Liberation Army (PLA) joint operations, were announced Saturday in a terse 30-second video released by the defense ministry.
A subsequent editorial in the People's Liberation Army Daily accused Zhang and Liu of “seriously trampling on and undermining the system of ultimate responsibility resting with the Central Military Commission chairman” – jargon that suggests they were a threat to the thing that matters most in Xi's eyes: his authority.
The allegations mark an apparent culmination in a ruthless, more than decade-long effort by Xi to oust opposition and clean up alleged graft. In recent years, that purge has depleted the military's upper echelon, with more than 20 senior military officials placed under investigation or ousted since 2023.
Just how deep that effort runs is now made even clearer in the probe against Zhang.
The general had long been seen as an unassailable, close, ally of Xi – another “princeling” son of revolutionaries, whose ties with the Chinese leader go back a generation to their fathers who fought together in China's Civil War.
“This is potentially a seismic shift in Chinese politics under Xi, and how he governs – this really demonstrates nobody in that system is safe, truly,” said Jonathan Czin, a fellow at the Brooking Institution's China Center.
The purge has “reached a crescendo now where it's hit the uppermost echelons of the party,” said Czin, also a former CIA analyst on China. That suggests Xi has concluded “the rot is so deep in the PLA and the mismanagement is so gross at the top that he needs to clean house within an entire generation of leaders.”
And when it comes to Zhang, that downfall is “almost Shakespearean,” Czin said, coming within the broader arc of how Xi began by going after enemies profiting off their positions, moved on to target even those he appointed himself and is now taking down even those with whom he's had a long-standing relationship.
“For Xi to get rid of a guy like this is really remarkable … because there's so little trust and because the politics are so vicious (in this system), those kind of relationships are even more of a precious commodity …they don't take years to build, they take decades, or in this instance, potentially a lifetime.”
The circumstances around Zhang's investigation remain unclear likely not only to those outside but also within the black box of China's military, a massive and opaque entity even by China's usual standards.
The Wall Street Journal reported, citing sources familiar with a high-level briefing on the allegations, that Zhang had been accused of leaking “core technical data on China's nuclear weapons to the US” as well as accepting bribes for official acts “including the promotion of an officer to defense minister.” CNN has not verified those claims and has reached out to China's defense ministry for comment.
But some experts wonder whether allegations of sharing secrets could merely be part of the party's effort to drum up explanations to ease concern within its ranks rather than legitimate concerns.
And rumors have swirled in the vacuum of information.
Those include speculation about Xi losing his grip on power, a theory experts largely reject. Others have focused on whether Xi is quashing rival factions within the military, which some observers say is plausible if the leader believed infighting was distracting top officials – or if Zhang was becoming a challenge his authority.
Roiled by purges and buffeted by US frictions, China's leadership meets to chart country's rise
The official language used in the PLA Daily editorial “could suggest that Zhang was becoming too powerful for Xi's liking,” according to Neil Thomas, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute's Center for China Analysis.
It could also mean “simply that he betrayed (Xi's) trust by helping corrupt the procurement bureaucracy and/or not doing his utmost to create a cleaner fighting force,” he said.
Since coming to power in 2012, Xi has driven a sweeping effort to reshape the military, not just to make it into a modern force able to take on rivals like the United States and back China's territorial claims, but, more importantly, to defend the party – and its leader – no matter what.
That's a goal that's widely seen as driven by Xi's shrewd look at history as he eyes autocratic regimes that have fallen when leaders lost control of the military. It's also one that is closely linked to the organization of China's military, which is controlled by the party, not the state.
A massive reorganization and technological modernization have gone hand in hand with an anti-corruption drive. Dozens of high-ranking military officials and defense sector executives have been taken down in the latest wave of those efforts since 2023.
But Xi's push to purge even his top brass more likely stands as testament to his power than weakness, experts say.
“The fact that Xi Jinping has been able to cashier so many PLA elites since he assumed power … is a clear sign his position in the regime is unassailable,” said James Char, an assistant professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies' Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies in Singapore.
The latest move now leaves Xi virtually alone at the top of China's military hierarchy.
The powerful Central Military Commission he chairs had six uniformed members after a regular leadership reshuffle in 2022. The latest probe (though yet to result in formal expulsions), leaves just one of those members standing: Zhang Shengmin, the military's anti-corruption tsar.
High-level ousters have left the PLA leadership “in a state of disarray right now,” said Thomas at the Asia Society.
“There are barely any officers left at the rank of general. I'm sure there are capable people waiting in the wings, but they'd all be new to senior leadership positions,” he said, noting Xi may use the more than 18 months before the next leadership reshuffle to vet new leadership candidates and “weed out the influence of existing patronage relations.”
But in the meantime, Xi has already been tapping second-line PLA officers to largely informally fill roles vacated by their disgraced predecessors across both Central Military Commission departments and branches of the military, according to Char in Singapore.
“The PLA's daily operations have carried on as normal despite these purges since a younger – and perhaps more professional – officer corps is on hand to assume those responsibilities,” he said.
But what that means for Beijing's broader ambitions – including its goal to take control of self-ruling Taiwan – is less clear. China's ruling Communist Party claims the island as its own territory, despite never having controlled it.
At the heart of that question are the matters of whether there will be an impact to the immediate operability of the military, the morale of the rank and file, or any timelines that Beijing may have for preparedness to achieve that goal, including through the use of military force.
The probe of Liu in particular underscores those questions, analysts say, given his role coordinating the PLA's top combat command institution.
But that might not be an issue of too much concern for Xi at the moment, according to Brookings' Czin.
Instead, he said, the Chinese leader is likely looking at a US administration that doesn't seem “particularly interested” in the issue of Taiwan and at the potential for a change of power in the Taiwan elections in 2028, and calculating: now is a “safe time to clean house.”
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Claims by Trump administration officials that the man fatally shot by a federal agent in Minneapolis lacked a right to possess a firearm and that his killing was justified are being dismissed by legal experts and assailed by gun rights groups ordinarily aligned with the president.
The rhetoric from Trump law enforcement officials, including his FBI director and the top Border Patrol agent, goes against the decadeslong GOP effort to throttle gun control rules.
“They've stood up in court and tried to push back against state laws that regulate firearms — access, use, carry — so it's pretty shocking to me to see them now use an example of a lawful gun owner as justification for force,” Megan Walsh, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School who specializes in the Second Amendment, said of the Trump officials' comments.
A federal immigration officer shot and killed 37-year-old Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on Saturday after wrestling the lawful gun owner to the ground as he was recording agents with a phone. At least one officer can be heard shouting “he's got a gun” as one officer appears to reach into Pretti's waistband. An officer appears to step away holding Pretti's weapon, and then a shot rings out about a second later, followed by at least nine more, videos reviewed by CNN show.
“We respect that Second Amendment right, but those rights don't count when you riot and assault, delay, obstruct and impede law enforcement officers and, most especially, when you mean to do that beforehand,” Border Patrol Commander-at-Large Gregory Bovino told CNN's Dana Bash on Sunday.
Bovino, who has been leading the administration's immigration enforcement operation in Minneapolis, did not cite evidence on his claims that Pretti committed violence or interfered with agents or that the protest was a “riot.”
Minnesota has for years allowed the open and concealed carry of a handgun with a license issued after an applicant meets certain criteria, and state regulations do not restrict such individuals from having firearms at protests. The state's laws are so permissive that licensed firearm owners are even allowed to bring guns into Minnesota's Capitol building.
Yet FBI Director Kash Patel, one of several administration officials who rushed to defend the shooting, said on Fox News: “You cannot bring a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It's that simple.”
“No one who wants to be peaceful shows up at a protest with a firearm that is loaded with two full magazines,” he added.
Walsh said she sees “no gray in this situation.”
“He was lawfully carrying a firearm, and that is not any license to kill someone,” Walsh said. “We have a Constitution that provides a Second Amendment individual right, and it is unlawful to kill a man for exercising his constitutional rights.”
Walsh noted that the Trump administration's rhetoric toward Pretti is out of step with its opposition to state firearms regulations. Just last week, the Justice Department urged the Supreme Court to strike down a Hawaii law that bans people from carrying guns onto private property without the explicit approval of the property owner, arguing it trampled on Second Amendment rights.
Amy Sweasy, a former longtime prosecutor in the Hennepin County Attorney's Office, which prosecutes cases in Minneapolis, agreed.
“It is inconsistent to hear an administration that has been very, very vocal in protecting Second Amendment rights and things like concealed-carry laws and open-carry laws to then — in a victim-blaming sense — saying, ‘Our agents aren't responsible' or that that this young man lost his life because of choices he made that are actually guaranteed to him by the same laws that they purport to support,” she said.
Patel's statements also drew immediate pushback from the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus, which on Sunday joined several other gun rights advocacy groups in sounding the alarm.
Gun rights groups have long defended the right to openly carry firearms in public, a position that Trump and others on the right have championed over the years.
“This is completely incorrect on Minnesota law. There is no prohibition on a permit holder carrying a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines at a protest or rally in Minnesota,” the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus wrote on X in response to Patel's comments.
A day earlier, Bill Essayli, a top prosecutor in the US Attorney's Office in Los Angeles, posted on X that “if you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you. Don't do it!”
Those remarks drew swift condemnation from the National Rifle Association, the US' leading gun lobby, which called them “dangerous and wrong” and urged officials to resist “making generalizations and demonizing law-abiding citizens.”
Another prominent group, the Gun Owners of America, described Essayli's comments as “untoward” and said the Second Amendment “protects Americans' right to bear arms while protesting — a right the federal government must not infringe upon.”
Andrew Willinger, a professor at Georgia State University's College of Law and expert on the Second Amendment, said that while the groups may not be outright embracing Pretti, their rapid rejection of the officials' statements underscore a commitment to the gun rights they've worked to advance.
“At the very least, I think it will put them in a tough position if they don't,” Willinger said. “It may be an instance where these gun rights groups are going to have to decide what to do when the victim is not your typical gun owner … and I think that might be the case here.”
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Seattle Seahawks quarterback Sam Darnold lifts the winner's trophy next to Michael Strahan, left, after a win over the Los Angeles Rams in the NFC Championship NFL football game Sunday, Jan. 25, 2026, in Seattle. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)
Seattle Seahawks defensive tackle Leonard Williams (99) celebrates after a win over the Los Angeles Rams in the NFC Championship NFL football game Sunday, Jan. 25, 2026, in Seattle. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)
Seattle Seahawks safety Nick Emmanwori (3) celebrates after a win over the Los Angeles Rams in the NFC Championship NFL football game Sunday, Jan. 25, 2026, in Seattle. (AP Photo/Stephen Brashear)
Los Angeles Rams wide receiver Puka Nacua (12) makes a touchdown catch past Seattle Seahawks cornerback Riq Woolen (27) during the second half of the NFC Championship NFL football game Sunday, Jan. 25, 2026, in Seattle. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
Los Angeles Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford (9) slides under Seattle Seahawks linebacker Boye Mafe (53) during the first half of the NFC Championship NFL football game Sunday, Jan. 25, 2026, in Seattle. (AP Photo/Stephen Brashear)
SEATTLE (AP) — Sam Darnold was cast aside by the New York Jets, who drafted him No. 3 overall in 2018. The Minnesota Vikings didn't bring him back after he led them to a 14-3 season but flopped in the playoffs.
Now, in his first season with the Seattle Seahawks, he's Super Bowl-bound.
Darnold threw for three touchdowns, the Seahawks' “Dark Side” defense came up with a critical fourth-down stop, and Seattle advanced to the Super Bowl, beating the Los Angeles Rams 31-27 in an electrifying NFC championship game on Sunday.
“You can't talk about the game without talking about our quarterback,” second-year coach Mike Macdonald said. “He shut a lot of people up tonight, so I'm happy for him.”
Led by Darnold — an eight-year veteran playing for his fifth team — the Seahawks (16-3) reached their fourth Super Bowl in franchise history and first in 11 years. Seattle lost that most recent appearance to New England, its opponent in two weeks at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California.
Darnold, who was blown out in his playoff debut last year with the Vikings — by the Rams, no less — played through an oblique injury and completed 25 of 36 passes for 346 yards with no turnovers. Jaxon Smith-Njigba had 153 yards receiving — the second-most in a playoff game in franchise history — and a touchdown on 10 catches.
“Can't say enough about Sam, man,” Smith-Njigba said. “It's been a great first year. We got one more to go. But for him to overcome what he had to overcome, I'm riding with Sam all day.”
The Seahawks needed Darnold to keep pace with Matthew Stafford, who drove the Rams (14-6) into position to take the lead with 4:59 remaining. On fourth-and-4 at the Seattle 6, coach Sean McVay elected to go for it and Stafford's pass was broken up in the end zone by Devon Witherspoon.
“He's just the heart of our defense,” safety Julian Love said of Witherspoon. “He just is the essence. 'Spoon is it. He plays with just such a raw energy. And we love him for it.”
The Rams didn't get the ball back until there were 25 seconds left, and Puka Nacua was tackled inbounds near midfield on the final play.
Stafford threw for 374 yards and three touchdowns, but the Rams were undone by critical errors, including a muffed punt by Xavier Smith in the third quarter. On the next play, Darnold connected with Jake Bobo for a 17-yard touchdown and a 24-13 lead.
“That was a tough one,” McVay said.
The Seahawks led 31-20 late in the third quarter on Darnold's 13-yard TD pass to Cooper Kupp, but the Rams got back into the game when Seahawks cornerback Riq Woolen was flagged for taunting after breaking up a pass to Nacua on third-and-12, giving Los Angeles a first down.
On the next play, Stafford threw at Woolen again, and Nacua beat him in the corner of the end zone for a 34-yard touchdown.
“Even though I made a great play, I wasn't great for my team,” Woolen said, “and I've got to be better with that and celebrate with the team.”
The Rams forced a punt on Seattle's next possession and went on a 14-play, 84-yard drive that came up empty thanks to Witherspoon's pass breakup.
Seattle stayed aggressive on its final possession, with Darnold throwing for three first downs to run out most of the clock.
Darnold set the tone with his first completion of the game, a 51-yarder to Rashid Shaheed. Four plays later, Walker ran 2 yards for a TD to make it 7-0.
Leading 13-10, Los Angeles forced a three-and-out late in the second quarter, but after two straight incompletions by Stafford, the Rams punted the ball back, and it took Darnold just 34 seconds to put the Seahawks ahead for good.
Smith-Njigba caught a deep pass from Darnold, absorbed a big hit by Kam Curl and held on for a 42-yard gain. Four plays later, Darnold and Smith-Njigba hooked up for a 14-yard TD that made it 17-13 heading into halftime.
“I told my team, I'm going to do whatever it takes. Whatever y'all ask of me, I'm gonna get it done, whatever that might be,” said Smith-Njigba, the NFL's leading receiver in the regular season. “And that's what you saw today. You just saw grit, determination, you saw passion out there and you saw a group, a collective, going out there and getting the job done.”
McVay bristled when asked if he expects Stafford to return next season. The 37-year-old is a finalist for his first MVP award after throwing for a league-leading 4,707 yards and a career-best 46 touchdown passes.
“I know that if he wants to, he's still playing at a pretty damn good clip,” McVay said. “I mean, he's the MVP of the league, and if he's not, respect for everybody else. But this guy played a level that's just different.”
Bobo's touchdown catch was his first since Jan. 5, 2025, which also came against the Rams, and the fourth of his three-year career. He gave all the credit to Darnold.
“He's the best in the world,” Bobo said. “It didn't surprise anybody in here, I'll tell you that.”
Rams: WR Jordan Whittington (chest) left in the third quarter. Defensive end Kobie Turner (cramps) also exited in the third.
Seahawks: LB Drake Thomas (shoulder) left in the fourth quarter. FB Brady Russell (hand) was injured in the second half and did not return.
Rams: Stafford turns 38 next month and has to wonder if this was his last, best chance at a second Super Bowl title.
Seahawks: Seek their second Super Bowl title after winning it all in the 2013 season with coach Pete Carroll and the “Legion of Boom” defense.
___
AP NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/nfl
Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
President Donald Trump dodged whether he supported federal agents' decision to shoot and kill 37-year-old Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on Saturday during an immigration operation.
Trump was pressed by Wall Street Journal reporter Josh Dawsey on whether Border Patrol agents responded appropriately when they killed Pretti, who briefly intervened when an agent pushed a woman to the ground during the operation. According to Dawsey, Trump did not answer the question twice before saying his administration was “reviewing everything.”
“We're looking, we're reviewing everything, and will come out with a determination,” the president responded.
Trump expressed displeasure with the shooting as a whole, while remaining critical of Pretti's decision to open-carry a handgun while protesting.
“I don't like any shooting. I don't like it,” he said. “But I don't like it when somebody goes into a protest, and he's got a very powerful, fully-loaded gun with two magazines loaded up with bullets also. That doesn't play good either.”
The Department of Homeland Security said after the shooting that Pretti was armed with a “9 mm semi-automatic handgun” and likely “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”
Trump appeared to stand by that account on Sunday, fixating on the gun itself and calling it “dangerous and unpredictable” and suggesting it could have fired unexpectedly.
Bystander footage, however, has largely called that characterization into question. Pretti is seen holding just his cellphone during the entire encounter and only briefly steps between the agent and the woman, before being pepper-sprayed and later dragged to the ground by at least five agents. While he was armed, an agent appears to remove the weapon from Pretti's waistband and away from the scene just before he is shot dead.
The shooting has led to backlash from both sides of the political spectrum, with multiple congressional Republicans calling for an investigation and the removal of federal immigration agents from Minneapolis.
BORDER PATROL AGENTS INVOLVED IN PRETTI SHOOTING REASSIGNED
Trump appeared open to that move in the Wall Street Journal interview, saying federal agents will leave the city “at some point.”
He did, however, maintain that some agents would be staying indefinitely to continue investigating the Minnesota fraud scandal, which he has attempted to tie to the shooting by alleging a “COVER UP” by state lawmakers.
Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., speaks during the Senate Democrat policy luncheon news conference at the Capitol, Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Rod Lamkey, Jr.)
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., speaks during the Senate Democrat policy luncheon news conference at the Capitol, Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Rod Lamkey, Jr.)
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., left, sits at left as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., center, talks with Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., during a round table discussion on the high cost of housing, on Capitol Hill, Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Rod Lamkey, Jr.)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Democratic senators are vowing to oppose a funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security following the shooting death of a 37-year-old Minnesota man, a stand that increases the prospect of a partial government shutdown by the end of the week.
Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, in a social media post hours after the Saturday shooting, said that what is happening in Minnesota is “appalling” and that Democrats “will not provide the votes to proceed to the appropriations bill if the DHS funding bill is included.”
Six of the 12 annual spending bills for the current budget year have been signed into law by President Donald Trump. Six more are awaiting action in the Senate, despite a revolt from House Democrats and mounting calls for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's impeachment.
If senators fail to act by midnight Friday, funding for Homeland Security and the other agencies covered under the six bills will lapse.
“Democrats sought common sense reforms in the Department of Homeland Security spending bill, but because of Republicans' refusal to stand up to President Trump, the DHS bill is woefully inadequate to rein in the abuses of ICE,” said Schumer, D-N.Y. “I will vote no.”
The White House reached out to Senate Democrats late Sunday, as have Republicans, according to a Senate Democratic leadership aide who insisted on anonymity to discuss the private talks.
But they have not yet raised any realistic solutions, the aide said.
Republicans will need some Democratic support to pass the remaining spending bills in time to avoid a partial shutdown. That support was already in question after Renee Good, a mother of three, was fatally shot and killed earlier this month by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis. But the fatal shooting Saturday of Alex Pretti, an intensive care unit nurse, quickly prompted Democrats to take a more forceful stand.
On Sunday, House and Senate Democrats convened separate conference calls as they privately assess next steps and press to restrain the Trump administration's immigration enforcement operations.
Washington Sen. Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee and key negotiator on the funding package, had been pushing her colleagues to vote for the homeland security bill, arguing that Democrats had successfully fought off major increases to the ICE budget.
But in the wake of the shooting, Murray said Sunday on X that “I will NOT support the DHS bill as it stands.”
“Federal agents cannot murder people in broad daylight and face zero consequences,” Murray wrote.
Federal officials have defended the actions of the agents involved in the Good and Pretti shootings as justified. Democrats said video released of both shootings showed otherwise. Republicans are increasingly challenged, with some calling for thorough investigations while others stand with federal officials.
“The events in Minneapolis are incredibly disturbing,” Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., posted on X. “The credibility of ICE and DHS are at stake. There must be a full joint federal and state investigation. We can trust the American people with the truth.”
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., wants a “thorough and impartial investigation” into the shooting and said “any administration official who rushes to judgment and tries to shut down an investigation before it begins are doing an incredible disservice to the nation and to President Trump's legacy.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. said Democrats should reconsider their threat to not support DHS funding and work with him to “end the mess created by sanctuary city policies.”
“Now is not the time to defund one of our major national security priorities: border protection,” Graham said on X.
The growing backlash from Democrats puts Republican leaders in the Senate in a difficult position.
Much of the government, including the Department of Defense, continues to operate on a short-term bill that provides funding only through Friday.
Republican leaders had hoped to avoid another shutdown after last fall's 43-day closure that revolved around Democrats' insistence on extending federal subsidies that make health coverage more affordable for those enrolled in the Affordable Care Act marketplace.
Before Pretti's death, many Democrats felt the same way about a potential shutdown, lending support in the House to most of the remaining appropriations bills — with DHS the exception.
House Democrats largely rejected the homeland security portion last week with just a handful joining Republicans to ensure its passage. More than 100 House Democrats called for Noem's impeachment.
The House sent the six funding bills to the Senate as a package, and that makes it exceedingly difficult to strip out the homeland security portion which Democrats are demanding.
Despite the procedural hurdles, Schumer said Sunday that Republicans should work with Democrats to advance the other five bills and rewrite the DHS bill. “This is the best course of action, and the American people are on our side,” Schumer said.
The path ahead is uncertain. The Senate is not scheduled to return to session until Tuesday, due to the snowstorm. The House plans to be out of session this week and would have to pass the funding package again if it is changed.
Democrats are pushing for policy changes to be added to the homeland security spending bill that would force ICE agents to use warrants for immigration arrests, mandate strengthened training, require agents to identify themselves and have Border Patrol agents stay on the border rather than assisting ICE with immigration raids in the interior of the country.
Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, the top Democrat on the subcommittee that oversees homeland security funding, told CNN's “State of the Union” on Sunday that Congress cannot fund a department “that is murdering American citizens, that is traumatizing little boys and girls across the country in violation of the law.”
Democratic senators discussed the options on Sunday evening's call but without changes from Republicans, they appeared headed toward a shutdown. On the morning call with House Democrats, they heard from Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and the state's attorney general, Keith Ellison, both former congressmen.
Several other Democratic senators announced they would vote “no” on homeland security money, including some who had helped Republicans end the record shutdown last year.
“The abuses of power we are seeing from ICE in Minneapolis and across the country are un-American and cannot be normalized,” Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., said in a post on X. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., also said she opposes that portion of the package.
Minnesota's Democratic senators also indicated they will oppose the DHS funding bill.
“For those asking where we go from here: Not voting to fund ICE is a great place for us to start,” Sen. Tina Smith wrote on X.
“We oppose the ICE funding bill. We call for a full and transparent investigation with state officials,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar said. ”And we call on our Republican colleagues to stand up. They know this is wrong.”
The progress that Congress has made so far on spending bills means that much of the federal government's work would continue even if lawmakers are unable to complete the job.
A bill that Trump signed Friday funds the departments of Justice, Commerce and the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers through the end of the budget year in September.
The Department of Agriculture was funded from a previous measure, which means a shutdown shouldn't stop food assistance this time.
But other critical operations of the government would be disrupted.
___
Associated Press writers Michelle L. Price and Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.
Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) reiterated his promise to oppose funding the Department of Homeland Security and suggested to “rewrite” the appropriations bill instead, as another possible government shutdown looms large this week.
Schumer voiced his opposition to the DHS funding bill after 37-year-old Alex Pretti was shot and killed by a Border Patrol agent during an immigration operation on Saturday in Minneapolis. The fatal shooting is the second officer-involved incident in the city this month after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and killed Renee Good on Jan. 7.
“Senate Republicans have seen the same horrific footage that all Americans have watched of the blatant abuses of Americans by ICE in Minnesota,” Schumer said in a statement Sunday. “The appalling murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis must lead Republicans to join Democrats in overhauling ICE and CBP to protect the public. Senate Republicans must work with Democrats to advance the other five funding bills while we work to rewrite the DHS bill. This is [the] best course of action, and the American people are on our side.”
Schumer echoed the proposals from Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) and Jack Reed (D-RI), who suggested dropping the bill and instead passing the other five. Other Democratic senators have suggested reworking the current DHS bill that narrowly passed the House last week, though time is running out.
The deadline to fund the government is Friday, and the Senate is out of session on Monday due to the winter storm affecting the Northeast. Should the upper chamber not reach a consensus on the bill by the end of this week, there will be at least a partial government shutdown — and the second one in recent months.
Late last year, debate over expiring pandemic-era Obamacare subsidies led to the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, lasting 43 days.
SCHIFF SAYS HE'S NOT GIVING ICE OR BORDER PATROL ‘ANOTHER DIME' AFTER PRETTI SHOOTING
That shutdown fight ended with a bipartisan agreement to negotiate the subsidies, and the Senate will need another, given Democrats' stated opposition to DHS funding, the Senate GOP's narrow majority, and the 60-vote threshold needed to break the filibuster and pass appropriations bills.
The Washington Examiner has reached out to Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) for comment.
In this article
Shares of Zoom popped 11% on Monday after analysts at Baird estimated that the company's investment in artificial intelligence startup Anthropic could be worth between $2 billion to $4 billion, depending on dilution assumptions.
In May 2023, Anthropic announced a partnership with Zoom and revealed that Zoom Ventures had invested in the company. The companies did not disclose the value of the investment, but Zoom reported making $51 million in "strategic investments" that quarter, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Baird's analysts estimate that all, or at least the "vast majority," of that investment went to Anthropic. The startup is currently valued at $350 billion, suggesting Zoom could see a return of roughly 78 times its investment, the analysts said.
"While we (and the market) have been primarily focused on ZM's ability to gradually reaccelerate revenue growth and capture AI opportunities, the quieter, hidden gem might be its $51 million investment in Anthropic in 2023," the analysts wrote in a Monday note.
Zoom exploded in popularity at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic as workers turned to the video-conferencing platform to stay in touch with colleagues, friends and family. But as the pandemic subsided and many workers returned to in-person roles, Zoom's stock has tumbled from its highs.
The company's investment in Anthropic could prove to be a bright spot, Baird's analysts said.
"ZM is literally invested in Anthropic's Claude success, and as Anthropic IPO rumors accelerate, the investment could become even more meaningful," the analysts wrote.
WATCH: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on AI race: Focused on making our models as smart and capable as possible
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Just days ago, it looked like the US would avoid a repeat of the government shutdown that took place in the fall.
Then, federal agents fatally shot Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
In the span of just a few hours following the shooting on Saturday, the odds that the government will shut down later this week rose from roughly 10% to the high 70s on prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi.
That's because Democratic senators now say they won't vote to fund the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS — the department that oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol — until reforms to immigration enforcement are made.
"What's happening in Minnesota is appalling —and unacceptable in any American city," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement on Saturday. "Senate Democrats will not provide the votes to proceed to the appropriations bill if the DHS funding bill is included."
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There are only two ways out of this:
But even if lawmakers go with the second option, a short shutdown through the weekend is likely.
To avoid a government shutdown after midnight late Friday evening, the Senate would need to pass the six-bill package, which funds DHS, the military, various government agencies, and a wide array of federal grants, among other things.
Those six bills have already passed the House, and they've been stitched together into one larger package in the Senate.
The GOP may control the upper chamber, but they can't ignore Democrats. Due to the Senate's 60-vote "filibuster" rule, and the fact that Republicans hold just 53 seats, Democratic votes are necessary to advance most major bills, including this one.
Democrats are only opposed to the DHS bill, and Schumer has called on Republicans to work with Democrats to separate out the bills. But the GOP has balked so far at that idea.
Furthermore, even if the bills are separated, the House would have to vote on them again to send them to President Donald Trump's desk.
The House is out of session until next week, meaning a shutdown at least until then is highly likely.
Just months ago, the federal government shut down for 43 days, the longest shutdown in American history. There are a few reasons why this one wouldn't be as bad.
For one, it would only be a partial shutdown, because lawmakers have already passed several bills to fund the government through September 30.
SNAP and WIC payments would be unaffected, Capitol Hill staffers would still get paid, and national parks would likely remain open.
Additionally, the path out of a shutdown is more straightforward.
In the fall, Democrats were demanding changes to healthcare while holding all of government funding back. This time, Democrats are only objecting to the DHS funding.
That means it's plausible that the Senate would separate out the other five bills, the House would re-pass those bills next week, and the partial shutdown would only last a few days.
Still, the DHS bill doesn't just fund ICE and border patrol. It also funds the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
That raises the possibility of delays at airports and issues with disaster aid if the department goes unfunded for a long period of time.
Additionally, ICE will remain funded, even if the DHS bill doesn't pass for a long time.
While the current DHS funding bill contains an additional $10 billion for ICE, the agency also received roughly $75 billion in funding via the "Big Beautiful Bill" in July.
Unless lawmakers were to agree to rescind that funding — extremely unlikely given GOP control of Congress — that money's here to stay.
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In this article
Michael Burry, the investor made famous by his bet against the U.S. housing market ahead of the financial crisis, disclosed that he has been buying shares of one-time meme darling GameStop.
"I own GME. I have been buying recently. I expect I am buying at what may soon be 1x tangible book value / 1x net asset value," Burry said in a Substack post published Monday. "And getting a young [GameStop CEO] Ryan Cohen investing and deploying the company's capital and cash flows. Perhaps for the next 50 years."
Shares of GameStop surged nearly 8% Monday following the news.
Burry, who recently closed his hedge fund Scion Asset Management, said his investment is a long-term value play rather than a wager on renewed meme-stock speculation. GameStop was at the center of a meme-stock frenzy that erupted roughly five years ago, when retail traders coordinating on online forums drove the shares to extraordinary heights and forced massive short-covering by hedge funds.
"I am not counting on a short squeeze to realize long-term value," he wrote. "I believe in Ryan, I like the setup, the governance, the strategy as I see it. I am willing to hold long-term, and I am excited to see where this goes. I am fifteen years his senior, but not too old to be patient."
The stock has since given back most of those gains as trading activity normalized and speculative interest waned. It last traded around $25 apiece.
Still, GameStop has taken advantage of periods of elevated investor interest to raise billions of dollars through equity offerings, leaving it with a substantial cash pile.
"Ryan is making lemonade out of lemons," Burry wrote. "He has a crappy business, and he is milking it best he can while taking advantage of the meme stock phenomenon to raise cash and wait for an opportunity to make a big buy of a real growing cash cow business."
The video game retailer began buying bitcoin last year in a similar move made famous by MicroStrategy. Cohen said at the time that the decision to buy bitcoin is driven by macro concerns as the digital coin, with its fixed supply and decentralized nature, could serve as protection against certain risks.
"I do not know about this Bitcoin thing, but I cannot argue with what has been done so far," Burry said.
Burry isn't the only notable investor betting on the company as of late. Just last week, Cohen snapped up 1 million shares of GameStop, according to disclosures filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In a Jan. 21 SEC filing, he noted that it's "essential" for the CEO of a public company to buy shares with his or her own personal funds "in order to further strengthen alignment with stockholders."
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A massive winter storm is battering the US, bringing heavy snow, sleet, and freezing rain to millions of Americans.
The storm, which has stretched over 2,000 miles from New Mexico to Maine, hit the south-central US on Friday night and is now pummeling the Northeast. At least 18 people have died from weather-related causes, according to the Associated Press.
As snowfall picked up in New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced schools would operate remotely on Monday due to the weather.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul had previously announced that "all state employees" were also authorized to work remotely to start the week.
"I encourage other employers to do the same, just to keep people off the roads and think about this," she said.
Here's where else the storm is set to hit.
Heavy snow is continuing to fall across large parts of the northeastern US.
"The storm will produce heavy snow over the Northeast and patches of rain/freezing rain over parts of the Mid-Atlantic. Snow will also develop along the Appalachians on Monday," the National Weather Service said in a Monday morning update.
The Great Lakes region is also set for a fresh wave of snow, travelling south from Canada, the NWS said Monday.
As of around 11:30 a.m. ET on Monday, extreme cold weather warnings are in effect for parts of 18 of the contiguous states, including Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, and Missouri.
In Arkansas, some areas recorded around seven inches of snowfall through Friday night into Saturday.
Much of the Northeast remains under Winter Storm Warnings, including parts of New York, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Connecticut.
The agency said power outages, tree damage, and dangerous travel conditions are also likely across parts of the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic due to freezing rain and lingering icing.
Major cities in the weather system's path include Atlanta, Charlotte, Richmond, Washington, DC, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston.
Roughly 800,000 customers from New Mexico to Virginia are without power as of late morning on Monday, according to PowerOutage.us.
Moving forward, the NWS said heavy snowfall is likely to lead to "widespread travel disruptions and closures" that could last several days.
Travel was hit hard this weekend, with airlines canceling thousands of flights across Saturday and Sunday, and cancellations continuing into Monday.
On Monday, over 4,900 flights were canceled as of around 11:30 a.m. ET, with all three New York airports canceling more than 40% of flights. Boston Logan was the worst-affected airport on Monday, canceling 61% of flights.
Monday's disruption followed the worst single day of flight cancellations since the COVID-19 pandemic, with more than 11,500 US flights canceled on Sunday, according to data from flight-tracking website FlightAware.
Dallas Fort Worth International Airport in Texas and Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International were the worst-affected airports on Sunday, per flight-tracking site FlightAware.
Washington DC's Ronald Reagan National Airport said airlines had cancelled all flights on Sunday.
In an update issued at 11 p.m. ET, the airport said that with precipitation ending, flight operations "should gradually increase beginning on Monday."
Many airlines are waiving rebooking fees for flights to and from affected regions.
This is a developing story. Please keep checking back for updates.
Jump to
As our family's primary vacation planner, I've found we get the most mileage out of cruises. The "most things included" pricing is easy on our budget, and we like the wide range of activities and dining options.
My kids are in high school, and we've been cruising together since they were in first grade. Still, I managed to make a rookie mistake with our most recent seven-night Western Caribbean Princess cruise.
I had booked it while on a Princess Alaskan cruise with my husband and got a great rate. However, I had a moment of panic when we boarded the Regal Princess weeks later and got a first look at our stateroom.
Although I'd selected a "cabin that sleeps four," I only saw two twin beds.
Despite the initial shock, we quickly realized our 222-square-foot cabin could indeed sleep four people. Our steward told us there were two additional beds stored in the ceiling that he would pull out every evening.
We asked if the two twin beds on the ground could be converted into a queen for my husband and me, and were told they could, but there would be no place to put the ladder for the upper bunks.
So, we left the arrangement as it was.
On the bright side, we had sufficient sleeping space, and my kids didn't have to share a bed. Our steward set up the beds each evening while we were at dinner and put them up again after breakfast.
Despite being small, the beds were comfortable, and we all got decent sleep.
The biggest issue was that there was no room to sit up and read or watch TV in bed — the upper bunk was that close to the ceiling. The ladders also made moving around the cabin a game of Tetris, especially at night.
Casualties included one head bump (me, the first night) and one kid stepping on my legs when he skipped the ladder. After that, we adjusted.
On the bright side, having a small balcony (albeit one with an obstructed view of the ocean) meant we had easy access to natural light, fresh air, and a bit of extra space, which made a difference.
In the end, we got a good enough discount on the room that I didn't mind a little extra inconvenience.
Though I would've liked a bigger bed and more room, our small stateroom didn't stop us from enjoying the cruise. We were only in the room to sleep and shower, and after a day or two, the bunks didn't feel like a big deal.
This was the first time my kids had sailed on Princess, and our postcard-sized digs didn't affect how we felt about the cruise overall.
We'd 1000% do this cruise with teenagers again — just not in this stateroom.
Looking back, I can see what led me to choose the wrong cabin for our family.
While booking with a sales rep on a previous cruise, I got caught up in the moment and the good deal. I didn't think to ask detailed questions, like the specifics of the bed arrangements.
My biggest mistake was assuming. On cruises I've been on with Disney and Carnival, cabins that sleep four are configured differently, with a queen bed and a couch that converts into bunks across the room.
I should've asked more questions and watched fellow cruisers' cabin tour videos online before booking anything. Had I done that, I likely would've chosen a different cabin or adjusted my reservation before our departure.
By the time we'd boarded, our cruise was full, and even if a larger cabin had been available, it would've cost more.
Next time, I'd be more prepared, or just book my cruise at home, where it'd be easier to review the details on my own.
A travel advisor familiar with cruising could also have steered us toward a better option for a family of four with teens. Though I recommend them to first-timers, I don't usually use one for cruises.
At the end of the day, even though I should have known better, I couldn't help but laugh at myself.
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In this article
Microsoft announced the next generation of its artificial intelligence chip, a potential alternative to leading processors from Nvidia and to offerings from cloud rivals Amazon and Google.
The Maia 200 comes two years after Microsoft said it had developed its first AI chip, the Maia 100, which was never made available for cloud clients to rent. Scott Guthrie, Microsoft's executive vice president for cloud and AI, said in a blog post Monday that, for the new chip, there will be "wider customer availability in the future."
Guthrie called the Maia 200 "the most efficient inference system Microsoft has ever deployed." Developers, academics, AI labs and people contributing to open-source AI models can apply for a preview of a software development kit.
Microsoft said its superintelligence team, led by Mustafa Suleyman, will use the new chip. The Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on for commercial productivity software bundles and the Microsoft Foundry service, for building on top of AI models, will use it as well.
Cloud providers face surging demand from generative AI model developers such as Anthropic and OpenAI and from companies building AI agents and other products on top of the popular models. Data center operators and infrastructure providers are trying to increase their computing prowess while keeping power consumption in check.
Microsoft is outfitting its U.S. Central region of data centers with Maia 200 chips, and they'll arrive at the U.S. West 3 region after that, with additional locations to follow.
The chips use Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.'s 3 nanometer process. Four are connected together inside each server. They rely on Ethernet cables, rather than the InfiniBand standard. Nvidia sells InfiniBand switches following its 2020 Mellanox acquisition.
The chip offers 30% higher performance than alternatives for the same price, Guthrie wrote. Microsoft said each Maia 200 packs more high-bandwidth memory than a third-generation Trainium AI chip from Amazon Web Services or from Google's seventh-generation tensor processing unit.
Microsoft can achieve high performance by wiring up to 6,144 of the Maia 200 chips together, reducing energy usage and total cost of ownership, Guthrie wrote.
In 2023, Microsoft demonstrated that its GitHub Copilot coding assistant could run on Maia 100 processors.
WATCH: Chinese AI models adapt without Nvidia
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In this article
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Monday said he had canceled all Treasury Department contracts with the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, one of whose employees leaked the tax records of President Donald Trump, and the billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, to media outlets.
Booz Allen Hamilton's stock price dropped by more than 10% on the heels of the Treasury Department's announcement.
The department said it currently has 31 separate contracts with Booz Allen Hamilton, totaling $4.8 million in annual spending and $21 million in total obligations.
"President Trump has entrusted his cabinet to root out waste, fraud, and abuse, and canceling these contracts is an essential step to increasing Americans' trust in government," Bessent said in a statement.
"Booz Allen failed to implement adequate safeguards to protect sensitive data, including the confidential taxpayer information it had access to through its contracts with the Internal Revenue Service," he said.
The department noted that between 2018 and 2020, Booz Allen employee Charles Edward Littlejohn "stole and leaked the confidential tax returns and return information of hundreds of thousands of taxpayers."
The data breach affected about 406,000 taxpayers, according to the IRS.
Littlejohn, 40, pleaded guilty in October 2023 to one count of disclosure of tax return information.
He admitted leaking Trump's tax records to The New York Times. He also admitted to leaking records about wealthy individuals to the news outlet ProPublica.
He was sentenced to the maximum term of five years in prison in January 2024.
CNBC has requested comment from Booz Allen.
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As an American who's traveled to 44 countries over the last 30 years, I've seen my fair share of unforgettable places.
But if I had to choose one place to visit again and again, it would be Bali, an island and province in Indonesia that combines vibrant culture, natural beauty, and a pace of life that feels both energizing and restorative.
After spending a month on the island in 2023, I fell in love. Here's what made my trip to Bali so special.
One of my favorite meals during my time in Bali came from a street vendor. The Javanese meal, called Tahu Tek, featured fried tofu, bean sprouts, a thick peanut sauce, and a pile of crackers on top. It cost me less than $2 (USD), but it was packed with flavor.
Bali's food scene goes far beyond street food, though. Even dining at restaurants felt affordable, making it easy to try local specialties, including babi guling, a traditional whole roasted pig.
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Plus, I could easily find international cuisine alongside local dishes.
I often went to Milk & Madu, which served American-style food like pizza and burgers. I also loved spending mornings at cafés in Canggu, sipping smoothies and enjoying breakfast bowls.
One of the main things that makes Bali truly special is its people. I've been to many destinations where the locals aren't always open to expats and travelers. But here, everyone I met was warm, welcoming, and genuinely kind.
For example, I used an app called Grab, similar to Uber, where drivers can pick up passengers on their motorbikes or in their cars.
I was wary about riding on the back of a stranger's bike, but the friendly drivers I had across several rides quickly made me feel at ease. Some would even check in with me during the ride to make sure everything was OK or to ask if I needed them to slow down.
Plus, I found an amazing community of digital nomads, creatives, and expats who decided to trade their office jobs for laptops in cafés. As an American living abroad, this made me feel at home.
It gave me a sense of familiarity in a new environment and made it easier to connect, since there was no language barrier. I felt more comfortable starting conversations and sharing experiences with other expats and long-term travelers.
During my time in Uluwatu, I met another nomad, and a simple conversation turned into spending the next few days together exploring. These kinds of moments felt much more natural and common in Bali than in other places I've visited, and I felt a strong sense of openness and connection.
Another thing I loved about Bali was the diverse range of activities available. Whether I was in the mood to visit temples or relax on the beach, there was always something to do.
For example, in Ubud, I wandered through the Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary, where ancient temples sit under jungle canopies. There were signs everywhere warning visitors to hold onto their belongings, and for good reason. The sanctuary is home to over 1,260 monkeys, who I saw climbing railings and jumping between statues.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, I also visited Alas Harum, a tourism destination in Tegallalang with lots of opportunities for adventure. Here, I flew out on a giant swing that went over rice fields. Taking in the view from way above the terraces was equal parts terrifying and fun.
And when I wanted to relax, I visited the beach clubs, where I lounged by the water with music playing and a drink in my hand.
After traveling to 44 countries, I can confidently say I'm no stranger to exploring new places.
Every destination I've visited has shown me new ways of living, but in Bali, I experienced a way of life that felt joyful, balanced, and connected. Plus, the tropical, warm, and consistent weather didn't hurt either.
Between the amazing food, the warm people, and the sense of adventure, I'm already dreaming of my next trip to this beautiful island.
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After a second fatality in confrontations with immigration officers in Minnesota on Saturday, business leaders took to social media to have their say.
Microsoft's chief scientific officer posted a screenshot of a statement from Alex Pretti's parents with the caption "Anguish and pursuit of truth" on X on Sunday.
Horvitz also wrote on X, "Values, service, and character," in response to a video posted by CBS News of Pretti reading a final salute to a veteran.
Former Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun replied "Murderers" to footage of the shooting circulating on Saturday. He has since reposted anti-ICE tweets and pushed back against users who criticize his stance.
LeCun has regularly shared posts critical of the Trump administration on social media.
Paul Graham, cofounder of startup accelerator Y Combinator, wrote in a post on X on Saturday: "If someone had predicted before the last election that if Trump won, federal officers would be shooting Americans in the streets, he'd have been dismissed as an alarmist."
Anthropic cofounder Chris Olah wrote on X that he typically doesn't comment on politics, but recent events "shock the conscience."
"My deep loyalty is to the principles of classical liberal democracy: freedom of speech, the rule of law, the dignity of the human person. I immigrated to the United States — and eventually cofounded Anthropic here — believing it was a pillar of these principles," he wrote, adding: "I feel very sad today."
The Minnesota Chamber of Commerce distributed a letter on Sunday signed by more than 60 CEOs of Minnesota-based companies, including professional sports teams.
Among the signatories were Target CEO Michael Fiddelke, 3M CEO William Brown, Allianz Life Insurance Company CEO Jasmine Jirele, Cargill CEO Brian Sikes, General Mills CEO Jeff Harmening, and UnitedHealth Group CEO Stephen Hemsley, among many others.
The letter called for an "immediate de-escalation of tensions" and for state, local, and federal officials to "work together to find real solutions."
"In this difficult moment for our community, we call for peace and focused cooperation among local, state, and federal leaders to achieve a swift and durable solution that enables families, businesses, our employees, and communities across Minnesota to resume our work to build a bright and prosperous future," the letter says.
The shooting divided leaders even within the same VC firm. Khosla Ventures' Keith Rabois posted on X "no law enforcement has shot an innocent person. illegals are committing violent crimes everyday." Rabois is a self-proclaimed contrarian whose political opinions have courted controversy in recent years.
Two colleagues — Ethan Choi and Vinod Khosla — disagreed with Rabois on X. Khosla described the video of Pretti's death as "macho ICE vigilantes running amuck empowered by a conscious-less administration."
Choi said Rabois' post did not represent the VC firm's view. "What happened in Minnesota is plain wrong. Don't know how you could really see it differently. Sad to see a person's life taken unnecessarily," Choi wrote.
The hedge-fund billionaire, who supported Trump in the 2024 election, called for calm in an X post on Saturday. Ackman said that the United States had reached a point where "there are only two sides to every issue and every incident."
"Individuals are 'convicted' of serious crimes in the headlines, by politicians appealing to their base, and ultimately in the minds of the public, or they are exonerated, before all of the facts are in and a detailed investigation has been completed," he wrote. "This is not good for America."
Two hours later, in another post on X, Ackman laid the blame on Minnesota's governor, Tim Walz.
"It is almost as if the governor of Minnesota called for protesters to intervene in ICE enforcements in an incendiary manner," he said, tagging Walz. "Inciting the people to rise up against law enforcement is guaranteed to end badly, and now we have seen the tragic consequences."
Ackman later donated $10,000 to a GoFundMe set up for Pretti's family after being asked to do so in a post on X by Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.
Ackman wrote in a reply on X: "Done. That said, I don't agree with the gofundme that he is an American hero, but his loss is tragic for him and his family."
Like Ackman, billionaire LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman is perpetually online, posting frequently on social media. The Democratic donor has been largely quiet this weekend, though he has reposted comments from other people, including one that called ICE "out of control."
In another post that Hoffman amplified, an X user called out "chronically online tech leaders" for suddenly falling quiet. Another X user called on business and tech leaders to use their platform to stand up to the Trump administration and its immigration enforcement tactics, to which Hoffman replied, "It's time for all Americans to do so."
James Dyett, the head of global business at OpenAI, called on leaders in the tech and business communities to use their influence to criticize the Trump administration's immigration policies.
"There is far more outrage from tech leaders over a wealth tax than masked ICE agents terrorizing communities and executing civilians in the streets," Dyer wrote on X. "Tells you what you need to know about the values of our industry."
Jeff Dean, Google DeepMind's chief scientist, wrote in response to a video of the shooting circulating on X: "This is absolutely shameful."
"Agents of a federal agency unnecessarily escalating, and then executing a defenseless citizen whose offense appears to be using his cellphone camera," he wrote. "Every person, regardless of political affiliation, should be denouncing this."
Minneapolis police confirmed that Alex Pretti, who was filming federal agents when they wrestled him to the ground, was legally carrying a gun.
Border Patrol officials said Pretti had threatened them with the gun, but multiple videos of the incident show that agents had already disarmed and subdued Pretti when he was shot.
Jason Calacanis, a prominent investor and entrepreneur who is these days perhaps most known as one of the hosts of the popular "All-In" podcast, blamed the country's political leaders in a post on X on Sunday.
"Once again, I will remind everyone that our leaders are failing us," he wrote. "True leadership would be to calm this situation down by telling these non-peaceful protesters to stay home while recalling these inadequately-trained agents."
He later posted that "all of this violence" could be avoided by fining businesses that hire immigrants who are not in the country legally.
Cristina Cordova, the chief operating officer at Linear, a product management software company, called the incident "indefensible" in a post on X.
"The victim's legally owned handgun was removed from the scene, and then ICE agents shot him multiple times. It's far from law enforcement — it's just murder," she wrote.
"Those who defend this don't care about law or order. It's about money, power, and protecting an executive branch that's already been bought and paid for."
David Marcus, cofounder and CEO of crypto payments company Lightspark, wrote on X in response to the incident: "The number of people who can hold two thoughts at the same time is dwindling at a dangerous rate."
"It's not because these anti-ICE protests are mostly inorganic and designed to generate this chaos, or that protesters show up with loaded guns that you can't also be totally appalled by citizens being shot dead on our streets," added Marcus, who is also a former president of PayPal.
"Let's just remember we're all Americans for a second."
Kath Korevec, the director of product at Google Labs, has called on X users to support their local immigration organizations.
"I can't go to Minneapolis. And it's only a matter of time before they show up in force here in the Bay Area. So here's what I'm doing to help my neighbors prepare," Korevec wrote in a post on X on Sunday.
She said in the post that she is researching, donating, and offering help to organizations that support immigrants.
Korevec said that she is calling her "congressmen and women and asking them not to approve ICE funding without major reform to how the organization is run."
"And I'm paying attention. Not looking away, even when it's hard," she added. "If you're able to do any of this where you live, now is the time."
Josh Miller, the cofounder and CEO of The Browser Company, wrote on X that he has been hesitant to speak on politics — but that this moment was no longer political.
"It is about something more fundamental," he wrote. "It is about what America stands for. Call it morals, call it decency, whatever word resonates most with you."
Miller wrote that the government "executed a man," and that he was "deeply sad for his parents."
Before The Browser Company, Miller sold his startup, Branch, to Facebook. He then left Facebook for the federal government, becoming the White House's first director of product under former President Barack Obama.
Google DeepMind's Dean thanked Miller for speaking up. Miller responded: "10 shots in the back of an American citizen who worked as an ICU nurse at the veterans hospital in town. While they knew they were being filmed in broad daylight. And our Secretary of War cheers them on from Twitter. Something is not right."
OpenAI's robotics head, Caitlin Kalinowski, responded on X, citing the Constitution.
1st Amendment — freedom of speech, assembly, and protest2nd Amendment — right to bear arms4th Amendment — protection against unreasonable searches and seizures5th Amendment — due process of law14th Amendment — equal protection under the law
The OpenAI staffer referenced the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, and 14th amendments, which include the right to protest and assembly, the right to bear arms, and the right to due process under the law.
Before working at OpenAI, Kalinowski was Meta's head of AR Glasses Hardware.
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If you're planning to buy your first home in 2026, you may want to check out some medium-sized metros east of the Rocky Mountains, where affordability is king and economies are growing.
That's where Realtor.com identified the 10 best cities for first-time homebuyers to purchase this year. These locations offer affordable home prices relative to income, robust amenities like quality shopping and daycare along with a large percentage of young residents ages 25 to 34, according to Realtor.com — all things that first-time homebuyers may have on their wish list.
Most of these places — such as Rochester, New York; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and St. Louis Park, Minnesota — are located along the Rust Belt and known for their snowy, cold winters and idyllic summers. Other places on this list — like Little Rock, Arkansas — are southern capital cities and cultural centers.
Most buyers in all these cities finance their home purchases with some type of mortgage, according to Realtor.com data. And many first-time homebuyers have unique needs when choosing a lender, including down payment assistance, exceptional customer service, and a robust loan selection. On top of that, regional lenders offer unique expertise in local markets and customer values. For example, Huntington Bank will pair you with a local expert to find the best product for you — including local down payment assistance and other financial resources.
Below, CNBC Select compiled our picks for the best mortgage lenders for first-time homebuyers looking to move to the cities on this list (or similar areas), based on the needs of this specific cohort.
Why we think it's best for a low-down-payment mortgage: Rocket Mortgage is one of the largest lenders of Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loans — government-backed mortgages that require a minimum down payment of 3.5%, much lower than most conventional mortgages, which typically require 5%.
On top of that, Rocket also offers a proprietary low-down payment loan for first-time homebuyers called ONE+ by Rocket Mortgage. With this loan, qualifying first-time homebuyers (borrowers who meet credit and employment requirements and make less than 80% of the area median income) can put down as little as 1%. Rocket will provide these borrowers with an additional 2% up to $7,500.
Apply online for personalized rates; fixed-rate and adjustable-rate mortgages are available.
Conventional loans, FHA loans, VA loans, Jumbo loans, low-down-payment mortgages
10-, 15- and 30-year fixed-term conventional loans, 30-year VA and FHA loans, custom mortgages with fixed-rate terms from 8 to 29 years.
620 for conventional loans
0% for VA, 1% for RocketONE+, 3% for conventional, 3.5% for FHA, 10% to 15% for jumbo
Read our review of Rocket Mortgage
Other pros for Rocket Mortgage: Excellent customer service rankings from J.D. Power and Better Business Bureau; shares rate and term details on website for easy borrower evaluation; expansive customer service options, including extensive phone line hours and a chat feature; great loan variety.
Some downsides to consider: Rocket does not have branches, so if you're keen on doing your banking in person, Rocket may not be for you.
Why we think it's best for Rust Belt Buyers: Huntington Bank, a Columbus, Ohio-based bank has a well-known presence and reputation in the Rust Belt. Each prospective homebuyer will be paired with a local expert who knows the ins-and-outs of the regional housing and mortgage landscape, according to Huntington's website.
It also says these experts will determine whether the borrower qualifies for local first-time homebuyer programs, such as the State Bond Down Payment Assistance program. Huntington offers mortgages that require a minimum down payment of 3%. Additionally, in 2021, it began a five-year commitment to providing $24 billion in affordable mortgages for underserved communities.
On top of that, it's the official partner bank of some Rust Belt institutions, including the Indiana Colts, the Cleveland Browns and various prominent universities across the Midwest.
Apply online for personalized rates
Conventional loans, VA loans, FHA loans, USDA loans.
10 – 30 years
620 for conventional loans, 580 for FHA loans
0% for VA loans and USDA loans, 3.5% for FHA loans
Terms apply.
Other pros for Huntington Bank: It has 1,000 branches in 14 states, including Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Minnesota — a relatively large physical footprint, so you can walk in and talk to a loan expert. It is also rated well by J.D. Power and the Better Business Bureau for customer satisfaction.
Some downsides to consider: Huntington doesn't post its rates and terms on its website, so it may be hard to compare them during your preliminary search. It also doesn't have branches in upstate New York, which is often considered part of the Rust Belt. But don't worry, New Yorkers, we have you covered below.
Why we think it's best for buyers in New York State: Based in Albany, New York, Homestead is known for its strong customer service reviews and local expertise. It offers several programs geared toward first-time homebuyers, including HomeReach, which provides down payment assistance for borrowers taking out an FHA loan, allowing them to put 0% down.
Apply online for personalized rates; fixed-rate and adjustable-rate mortgages are available.
Conventional loans, FHA loans, VA loans, USDA loans, HomeReady, investor loans, renovation loans, Jumbo loans, Energy Efficient Mortgage, refinance, reverse mortgage, HomeReach, Doctors+ loans
Apply online for terms
620 for conventional loans; 580 for FHA loans
0% for VA and USDA, 0% for HomeReach, 3% for HomeReady, 3% for conventional, 3.5% for FHA, 10% to 15% for jumbo
Other pros for Homestead Funding Corp: Homestead offers a $5,000 on-time closing guarantee if it doesn't close your loan by the contracted date. It also has a wide variety of primary mortgage, renovation and reverse mortgage products. Plus, it has an excellent customer service record, including an average of 4.98 out of 5.0 stars across over 4,300 reviews on Zillow. It also has an A+ rating from the BBB.
Some downsides to consider: Homestead exclusively works in the mortgage space, so you'll have to do your other banking separately.
Why we think it's best for buyers in the South: Jackson, Mississippi-based Hope Credit Union is a financial institution in the heart of the South.
It offers several products for low- and moderate-income homebuyers. For example, a special down payment assistance loan allows homebuyers to purchase with 0% down up to $350,000 and 3% down up to $425,000. Hope Credit was founded to serve the underserved, and so its products reflect that mission, according to its website.
Apply online for personalized rates; fixed-rate and adjustable-rate mortgages are available.
Conventional loans, FHA loans, VA loans, USDA loans, Affordable Housing Program loans, ITIN loans
Apply online for terms
620 for conventional loans; 580 for FHA loans and Affordable Housing Program loans
0% for VA, USDA and Affordable Housing Program loans; 3.5% for FHA loans; 3% for conventional loans
Other pros to consider: Unlike many credit unions, it's pretty easy to join. People can sign up for a membership fee of $10.
Some downsides to consider: Membership is restricted to those in Mississippi, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas and Louisiana.
Here is a more in-depth breakdown of the top markets, according to data provided by Realtor.com.
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At CNBC Select, our mission is to deliver high-quality service journalism and comprehensive consumer advice to our readers, enabling them to make informed financial decisions. Every mortgage review is based on rigorous reporting by our team of expert writers and editors with extensive knowledge of financial products. While CNBC Select earns a commission from affiliate partners on many offers and links, we create all our content without input from our commercial team or any outside third parties and we pride ourselves on our journalistic standards and ethics.
CNBC Select reviews mortgage products using a variety of criteria, including average rates, terms, availability, fees, types of loans offered, online experience and customer satisfaction.
Additionally, we incorporate findings from independent sources, including lender scores from the J.D. Power mortgage origination and servicing surveys and ratings from the Better Business Bureau.
For home equity loans, we review rates, repayment terms, the amount of equity required and the minimum and maximum loan amounts available.
We also consider requirements for credit scores, debt-to-income ratios and combined loan-to-value ratios.
Catch up on CNBC Select's in-depth coverage of credit cards, banking and money and follow us on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to stay up to date.
Trump administration border czar Tom Homan will head to Minnesota to manage U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's on-the-ground operations there in the wake of Alex Pretti's killing by federal agents in Minneapolis, President Donald Trump and the White House said Monday.
"Tom is tough but fair, and will report directly to me," Trump said in a Truth Social post.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a separate social media post that Homan will coordinate with officials leading ongoing investigations into fraud schemes in Minnesota.
Trump's post said Homan has not previously been involved in Minnesota, where thousands of federal agents have been deployed in recent weeks to carry out the Trump administration's aggressive deportation agenda.
Two U.S. citizens have been fatally shot in Minneapolis in less than a month in altercations with federal agents. The killings have stoked massive protests, heated denunciations of ICE from Democrats and pleas for de-escalation from business leaders.
Trump's decision to give Homan control in Minnesota comes as Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and other administration officials face mounting criticism, including from gun rights groups and some conservatives, over their leadership and rhetoric in Minneapolis.
Fox News reported Sunday that some senior officials involved in immigration enforcement have "grown increasingly uneasy & frustrated [with] some of the claims & narratives DHS pushed" following the latest shooting.
Axios reported last month that Noem and Homan have a tense and acrimonious working relationship. Trump has praised both officials.
Noem, in a statement on X, said Trump's decision to tap Homan for Minnesota is "good news for peace, safety, and accountability in Minneapolis."
"I have worked closely with Tom over the last year and he has been a major asset to our team— his experience and insight will help us in our wide-scale fraud investigations, which have robbed Americans, and will help us to remove even more public safety threats and violent criminal illegal aliens off the of streets of Minneapolis," Noem said.
"We continue to call on the leadership in Minnesota to allow for state and local partnership in our public safety mission," she said.
The president's switch-up also comes as his polling numbers on immigration, and his overall approval rating, have declined, according to recent surveys from The New York Times and Siena University and others.
In another Truth Social post later Monday morning, Trump said Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz called him and asked to work together in the state.
"It was a very good call, and we, actually, seemed to be on a similar wavelength," Trump wrote. "I told Governor Walz that I would have Tom Homan call him, and that what we are looking for are any and all Criminals that they have in their possession."
"The Governor, very respectfully, understood that, and I will be speaking to him in the near future. He was happy that Tom Homan was going to Minnesota, and so am I!" Trump added.
The positive words for Walz mark a jarring shift in tone from the Trump administration, which has regularly castigated the Democratic governor and even accused him of helping stoke the social strife in Minneapolis that led to the shootings.
The government has reportedly subpoenaed Walz and other Minnesota Democrats as part of an investigation into possible obstruction of federal law enforcement operations in the state.
Walz in previous statements has urged Trump to join him to restore calm to Minneapolis.
Tensions in Minnesota have boiled over after the two killings by federal agents in Minneapolis.
Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was fatally shot by ICE agent Jonathan Ross on Jan. 7 as she began to drive her SUV after another agent ordered her out of the car.
On Saturday, Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care unit nurse in Minneapolis, was shot and killed by federal officers.
Both killings occurred in daylight in front of witnesses and were caught on video from multiple angles, massively ratcheting up the already-intense scrutiny over immigration agents' tactics and training.
In both cases, numerous Trump administration officials rushed to defend the agents' actions as justified, while making claims about the incidents that later analyses found were contradicted by the available video evidence.
On the same day that Pretti was killed, DHS claimed that he approached U.S. Border Patrol officers with a handgun and, after they attempted to disarm him, "violently resisted."
Noem echoed that statement. Later, Greg Bovino, Border Patrol commander at large, claimed Pretti may have been intending to "massacre law enforcement."
But videos show Pretti holding up a phone as the confrontation begins. And the clips also appear to show one officer removing a weapon from Pretti's person prior to any shots being fired.
Pretti was believed to be a lawful gun owner with a permit to carry his weapon, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara said at a news conference.
Trump, asked by The Wall Street Journal on Sunday if he believed shooting Pretti was the right thing to do, did not directly answer.
"We're looking, we're reviewing everything and will come out with a determination," Trump told the newspaper.
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Most McDonald's locations around the world follow a familiar design: red-and-white branding topped with golden arches. But some stand out for their distinct architecture and unique backstories.
From a glass-covered restaurant in Batumi, Georgia, to one built over an ancient Roman road in Italy, the fast-food chain has found unique ways to blend with the local surroundings while maintaining its individuality.
In his book, "McAtlas: A Global Guide to the Golden Arches," which was released in November 2024, author and photojournalist Gary He captured the essence of some of these locations while explaining what makes each one special.
Between 2019 and 2024, He traveled to over 55 countries and dined at more than 100 McDonald's restaurants. When it came to picking his top locations, he had clear favorites.
"I wanted to document the more interesting parts of the largest restaurant group in the world," He told Business Insider, emphasizing that the project was an independent undertaking.
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Here are five unique McDonald's locations that He recommends fans of the brand must visit.
The McDonald's in Sälen, Sweden, tops He's list of best locations.
Nestled in one of Sweden's biggest ski resorts, Lindvallen, this spot offers a unique "ski-thru" experience. It allows skiers to grab a Big Mac without leaving their skis.
The restaurant opened in 1996 and operates daily from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. during ski season.
"The air is so clean and crisp — it's like being on top of the world," He told Business Insider, adding, "When I visited, it wasn't even busy. It was just me, the McSki, and the mountains. I was just hanging out and enjoying myself."
Getting there isn't easy, though. He said it took him six hours to travel from Stockholm, with three transfers — first, from a train station at Borlänge Centralstation to a bus, and then 48 stops later, another bus — but the journey was worth it.
"The McSki is hands-down the coolest McDonald's I've visited anywhere in the world," He said.
"I really love the Shenzhen location in China," said He, adding, "It was the first McDonald's in China at a time when the country wasn't fully open to American businesses."
The restaurant opened on October 8, 1990, in Shenzhen's special economic zone. On its first day, it welcomed over 40,000 customers despite a seating capacity of 460, the South China Morning Post reported.
The restaurant balances local design with the chain's signature branding. The three-floor building features pagoda-style roofs, integrating traditional Chinese architectural design with the golden arches.
"It's pretty epic," He said.
Have you ever wondered what it's like to enjoy a Big Mac on a static passenger plane? In Taupo, a town in New Zealand, you can.
Named one of the "world's coolest McDonald's," per a signpost, this restaurant is inside a decommissioned DC-3 plane built in 1943. At first, it was used as a passenger plane and then as a crop duster, an agricultural aircraft that sprays pesticides on crops from the air.
In 1984, it was decommissioned and, per Atlas Obscura, became a promotional product in Taupō's Aeroplane Car Company's parking lot until McDonald's bought it in 1990.
"The airplane location in Taupo is iconic," said He.
A McDonald's in the shape of a UFO is fitting for Roswell, a town known for its rumored alien sightings and extraterrestrial encounters.
The town became popular in 1947 when a mysterious aircraft, which the local newspaper, the Roswell Daily Record, identified as a "flying saucer," crashed into a ranch. Then, in 1980, Stanton Friedman, a former nuclear physicist, came across the 1947 news story and alleged it to be an alien spacecraft, sparking widespread outcry.
Government records later showed the aircraft was a top-secret government surveillance balloon used to detect echoes of Soviet nuclear-testing blasts.
But by then, people were convinced the government was hiding information about alien life, and UFOs had become a mini-industry with several themed attractions, such as the annual UFO festival and a museum, spread across town.
In 2005, a few miles from the crash site, McDonald's opened a restaurant shaped like a spaceship with neon lights.
But He loves the restaurant for more than just its exteriors.
"It has a gift shop," he said, adding, "I mean, it's cool looking, but they have merchandise, which I think is super cool."
The gift shop features Ronald McDonald in a spacesuit and alien statues.
He's final favorite is the Méqui1000 in São Paulo, Brazil, a spot that combines playful creativity with historical significance.
"It looks like the White House but decorated as a kindergartner's art project," He said, adding that the restaurant's façade undergoes multiple changes in a year and is usually adorned with vibrant artwork for promotional campaigns.
Méqui1000 also holds cultural significance; it was the 1,000th McDonald's in Brazil, one of 20 nations with over 1,000 McDonald's stores, according to Yahoo Finance.
"It's a huge market and an important location," He said.
The menu here also features items exclusive to Brazil, like the Super Mac, a fully loaded burger with lettuce, tomato, and onion, which is in a contrast to the simpler burgers popular in the US.
"Culturally, Americans want it [their burgers] cheap, fast, and straightforward, but in Brazil and other countries, people want their burgers a little more dressed up," He said.
Editor's note: This story was first published in November 2024 following an interview with photojournalist Gary He. It was updated in January 2026.
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Shares of CoreWeave popped 12% on Monday after Nvidia announced it has invested $2 billion in the artificial intelligence infrastructure provider.
Nvidia purchased CoreWeave Class A common stock at $87.20 per share, according to a release, a discount from Friday's closing price of $92.98. The investment will help CoreWeave accelerate its buildout of "5 gigawatts of AI factories by 2030," the companies said.
"This deal allows us to accelerate our build, which will lead to continued diversification and reducing dependency on any particular client as we scale into this additional data center capacity," CoreWeave CEO Mike Intrator told CNBC's "Squawk on the Street" on Monday.
A gigawatt is a measure of power that's becoming an increasingly common metric for describing AI data center capacity. Five gigawatts is roughly equivalent to the annual power consumption of 4 million U.S. households, according to a CNBC analysis of data from the Energy Information Administration.
"The thing to remember is we've invested $2 billion into CoreWeave, but recognize that the amount of funding that needs to be raised yet to support that five gigawatts is really quite significant," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC during the interview. "We're investing a small percentage of the amount that ultimately has to go and be provided."
CoreWeave primarily generates revenue by building and renting out data centers that are full of Nvidia's graphics processing units, which are key for training models and running large AI workloads. The company, which some investors have classified as a "neocloud," has become a crucial player in an increasingly interconnected web of AI infrastructure partners.
Prior to Monday's announcement, Nvidia was already a major CoreWeave backer.
In September, CoreWeave disclosed an order worth at least $6.3 billion from Nvidia in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Nvidia has an obligation to buy the "residual unsold capacity through April 2032, according to the agreement.
CoreWeave went public on the Nasdaq in March, and the company raised billions of dollars in debt and equity, including from Nvidia.
"We're in the beginning of the AI infrastructure build-out, and the demand is just extraordinary," Huang said on Monday.
As AI startups race to build out their computing infrastructure, CoreWeave has been on a deal-making blitz. The company announced in September that it agreed to provide Meta with $14.2 billion of AI cloud infrastructure, just days after expanding its contract with OpenAI to $22.4 billion.
But CoreWeave's stock has been shaky in recent months as some investors worry that the company is taking on high levels of debt to finance those multibillion-dollar deals.
Intrator told CNBC earlier this month that AI will eventually be embedded into "absolutely everything we do" and that the technology will "continue to pay dividends over the next 100 years."
"What you're seeing is the base-load infrastructure being built right now at what has historically been a pace that wasn't even considered," he said. "Companies like CoreWeave, and there are others, are out there building the infrastructure to be able to deliver that for these clients."
PRO: Watch CNBC's full interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and CoreWeave CEO Mike Intrator
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Price rises and memory shortages are likely to continue through 2027, a top semiconductor industry CEO told CNBC, adding to the view that the crunch that's been caused by the AI infrastructure boom may last longer than expected.
Memory chips are a key component of consumer electronics devices like smartphones and laptops. They have also become a critical part of artificial intelligence data centers and the servers that are installed in these facilities. In particular, there is significant demand for high-bandwidth memory.
As tens of billions of dollars continue to be spent on data center infrastructure, the demand for memory chips has gone through the roof, sparking an unprecedented price rise for the semiconductors, which is set to continue this year.
Sassine Ghazi, CEO of Synopsys, a key semiconductor design tool company, told CNBC in an interview last week that the chip "crunch" will continue through 2026 and 2027.
Ghazi said most of the memory from the top players "is going directly to AI infrastructure, but many other products need memory, so those other markets are starved today because there is no capacity left for them."
Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are the biggest memory companies in the world.
While these companies are aiming to expand manufacturing, it takes a "minimum" of two years before that comes online, which is one reason why the crunch is set to last, Ghazi said.
Memory prices have historically traded in cycles of short supply or oversupply, which have dictated the price of the components. However, some analysts have dubbed the current trend a "super cycle."
"Now it's a golden time for the memory companies," Ghazi said.
Winston Cheng, chief financial officer of the world's biggest PC maker Lenovo, also said in an interview last week that "we will see memory prices going up," noting there is high demand and not enough supply.
Memory price jumps mean that consumer electronics companies may have to consider price rises.
Chinese electronics giant Xiaomi, one of the world's biggest smartphone firms, said last year that it expects price rises to happen in 2026 for mobile phones. However, Synopsys' Ghazi said price hikes are "happening already."
Lenovo's Cheng said as there is high demand for memory chips, he is "very confident that the cycle would be such that we could pass on the cost."
Lenovo has a global "diversified" supply chain with 30 manufacturing plants across the world, which may help it mitigate some of the risks around the memory shortage, Cheng said.
He noted however, that the consumer device segment is "also hurting a little bit ... in terms of price demand." He added that PC and laptop users are still upgrading to Windows 11, Microsoft's operating system that was released in 2021.
"I think that replacement cycle is very real," Cheng said. Nevertheless, Price increases would "start hitting the lower end" of the electronics market first.
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A massive winter storm is battering the US, bringing heavy snow, sleet, and freezing rain to millions of Americans.
The storm, which has stretched over 2,000 miles from New Mexico to Maine, hit the south-central US on Friday night and is now pummeling the Northeast. At least 18 people have died from weather-related causes, according to the Associated Press.
As snowfall picked up in New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced schools would operate remotely on Monday due to the weather.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul had previously announced that "all state employees" were also authorized to work remotely to start the week.
"I encourage other employers to do the same, just to keep people off the roads and think about this," she said.
Here's where else the storm is set to hit.
Heavy snow is continuing to fall across large parts of the northeastern US.
"The storm will produce heavy snow over the Northeast and patches of rain/freezing rain over parts of the Mid-Atlantic. Snow will also develop along the Appalachians on Monday," the National Weather Service said in a Monday morning update.
The Great Lakes region is also set for a fresh wave of snow, travelling south from Canada, the NWS said Monday.
As of around 11:30 a.m. ET on Monday, extreme cold weather warnings are in effect for parts of 18 of the contiguous states, including Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, and Missouri.
In Arkansas, some areas recorded around seven inches of snowfall through Friday night into Saturday.
Much of the Northeast remains under Winter Storm Warnings, including parts of New York, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Connecticut.
The agency said power outages, tree damage, and dangerous travel conditions are also likely across parts of the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic due to freezing rain and lingering icing.
Major cities in the weather system's path include Atlanta, Charlotte, Richmond, Washington, DC, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston.
Roughly 800,000 customers from New Mexico to Virginia are without power as of late morning on Monday, according to PowerOutage.us.
Moving forward, the NWS said heavy snowfall is likely to lead to "widespread travel disruptions and closures" that could last several days.
Travel was hit hard this weekend, with airlines canceling thousands of flights across Saturday and Sunday, and cancellations continuing into Monday.
On Monday, over 4,900 flights were canceled as of around 11:30 a.m. ET, with all three New York airports canceling more than 40% of flights. Boston Logan was the worst-affected airport on Monday, canceling 61% of flights.
Monday's disruption followed the worst single day of flight cancellations since the COVID-19 pandemic, with more than 11,500 US flights canceled on Sunday, according to data from flight-tracking website FlightAware.
Dallas Fort Worth International Airport in Texas and Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International were the worst-affected airports on Sunday, per flight-tracking site FlightAware.
Washington DC's Ronald Reagan National Airport said airlines had cancelled all flights on Sunday.
In an update issued at 11 p.m. ET, the airport said that with precipitation ending, flight operations "should gradually increase beginning on Monday."
Many airlines are waiving rebooking fees for flights to and from affected regions.
This is a developing story. Please keep checking back for updates.
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USA Rare Earth shares rallied Monday after the critical minerals startup announced that the Department of Commerce will take an equity stake.
Commerce has issued a letter of intent that would provide USA Rare Earth with a $1.3 billion loan and $277 million in federal funding.
USA Rare Earth will issue Commerce 16.1 million shares of common stock and 17.6 million in warrants. The U.S. government will have an 8% to 16% stake in the company depending on whether the warrants are exercised, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
USA Rare Earth will also raise $1.5 billion from private investors. The proposed deal with Commerce is subject to the finalization of certain conditions.
CEO Barbara Humpton said the deal with the U.S. government will turn USA Rare Earth into an industry leader. Its stock soared more than 20% after the announcement Monday.
"This is a watershed moment in our work to secure and grow a resilient and independent rare earth value chain based in this country," Humpton told analysts on a call Monday.
"We have long said that meeting the urgent call to reassure the rare earth and critical minerals industry will require a multiplayer solution, and this establishes our company as one of the leaders," she said.
USA Rare Earth is the latest in a series of mining companies that the Trump administration has taken equity stakes in as it builds a Western rare earth and critical minerals supply chain to reduce dependence on China.
Rare earths are a subset of critical minerals that are crucial inputs in strategic industries like defense, robotics, electric vehicles and semiconductor manufacturing.
The capital infusion from the Trump administration will help USA Rare Earth advance its plan to build a magnet manufacturing plant in Stillwater, Oklahoma, and a mine at a rare earth deposit in Sierra Blanca, Texas, called Round Top.
Commerce will disburse the funding from 2026 through 2028 based on milestones as USA Rare Earth implements its business plan, Chief Financial Officer Rob Steele told analysts on the call.
USA Rare Earth is on track to commission its magnet manufacturing plant in the first quarter of 2026, Steele said. It aims to start commercial mining operations at Round Top in late 2028, he said.
The company needs about about $4.1 billion to execute its plan, Steele said. It will have about $3.5 billion between its current cash and the government financing as well as private funding announced Monday, he said. This leaves $600 million in additional capital that USA Rare Earth needs to raise.
"We believe we can raise the remaining capital from attractive sources, and you should assume that's equity capital but that can come from strategic investments as well as institutional investors," Steele said.
But USA Rare Earth has to satisfy several conditions before the agreement with Commerce is finalized. This includes raising at least $500 million from sources other than the federal government, which it will satisfy with the private funding announced Monday.
It also has to secure two memorandums of understanding with semiconductor end or midstream users, obtain feedstock supply agreements through 2027, and define a power plan for its magnet facility among other conditions, according to its SEC filing.
The planned investment in USA Rare Earth comes after the Defense Department struck a landmark deal last summer with rare earth miner MP Materials that included an equity stake, price floor and offtake agreement. The Trump administration also took stakes in Lithium Americas and Trilogy Metals last year.
The agreement with USA Rare Earth does not include price floors or offtake agreements.
The U.S. has been dependent on rare earth imports from China, which dominates the global supply chain. Beijing tried to cut off rare earth exports last year during trade disputes with the Trump administration.
"USA Rare Earth's heavy critical minerals project is essential to restoring U.S. critical mineral independence," Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in a statement. "This investment ensures our supply chains are resilient and no longer reliant on foreign nations."
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This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Amy Lovett, 54. After being laid off in July, Lovett began her job search with a résumé that included her photo and full work experience. Once she removed her photo, some dates, and shortened her work history, Lovett, who lives in the St. Louis area, said she started getting more attention from employers. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.
At my last job as an account executive at a software company, we had downsized significantly. I was one of the last senior reps. From what I understand, it was a payroll decision. In July, I was laid off after 20 years.
At first, of course, you're a little panicked, but I wouldn't say I was too crazy. It was also a bit of relief, because there had been so much business change going on that everybody was kind of on edge.
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I was in a position to take a step back and really figure out what I wanted to do. I didn't want to take too much time off, but I was able to take enough to be like, "OK, what do I like about this? What don't I?"
I took probably a couple of weeks. After that, it was full focus on my résumé and talking with former colleagues. September is when I really started hitting the job search hard.
With my résumé, I changed keywords as needed. You've got to make them more specific to the role these days. Otherwise you you won't even get a call. You've definitely got to do more customization than you used to.
I got some responses, but I didn't get any interviews. Originally, I had my photo on my résumé. That résumé also included a lot of dates. I would say I'm a younger-looking 50. I wouldn't say I look like I'm 80 or anything.
I had a career advisor review my résumé. She said, "Try taking your photo off of there. Remove a lot of the dates." So I took my past experience, except for the last 20 years, off. For older jobs, I would give a bullet, but it was mainly the last 20 years-plus of my experience.
Once I made those changes, that's when I started getting pinged fairly often. It absolutely felt like night and day. I was having calls with companies two to three times a week.
I felt there was a bigger demand out there than I initially thought, which gave me more confidence — feeling like, "OK, these companies are pinging me and showing interest."
I think ageism was a factor, especially with a lot of SaaS companies that have a lot of younger people right out of college.
During my search, I didn't let up. I took it seriously. I was working on résumés and applications every weekday. It's hard to stay positive for that long, doing that day after day. For some reason, I was energized to try something new.
I had a spreadsheet. I had to keep track of everything because there was a lot of information. I didn't want to be out of work for long.
I would tweak my résumé. I would run it through AI. I don't like the AI-generated résumés. You can tell they're AI. The verbiage, a lot of times, doesn't sound like a person. I would never write like that. You've got to think: Does it sound like how you would communicate?
I did lean into AI because it helped me speed up the process, because there's so much involved, and I was really just trying to find something as quickly as possible.
I used AI when I would work on my cover letters. I would take my résumé and compare it to their job requirements, and then shorten it. I think those personalizations were super important.
Going forward, especially in the field that I'm in, you've got to embrace technology.
When I got the job offer, they called me. I missed the call because I wasn't by my phone. I was supposed to have another interview in two days, so I was like, "This is either good or bad."
I called back, and they said, "Oh, we don't need you for that last interview. We'd like to offer you the job."
Do you have a story to share about your career? Contact this reporter at tparadis@businessinsider.com.
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Business Insider recently launched our Future of Capitalism series to examine shifting attitudes about capitalism, fairness, opportunity, hard work, and success in the US — everything from the federal government's role in the economy to the change in how capitalism is being taught in high schools.
We also wanted to hear directly from you, our readers, about how America's economic system has shaped your life.
Hundreds of you weighed in, and several people agreed to be interviewed to share more deeply their experiences, uncertainty, frustration, and cautious optimism — a revealing snapshot of how capitalism is being reassessed in real time, across generations.
An 81-year-old woman in California living on Social Security described spending her life climbing a hill that keeps getting steeper. A 54-year-old in Las Vegas says he's still waiting for boomers to pass his generation the baton. A 25-year-old from Tennessee who enlisted in the military to pay for college said the system isn't really working, while a 64-year-old New Jersey retiree called capitalism the "greatest economic system in the world."
Below, we highlight eight people's personal experiences of capitalism. Their words have been edited for length and clarity.
Alex English, 38, is based in Tampa, FL, and is currently unemployed after being laid off.
I've been unemployed for a year and a half. Before being laid off, I lived in LA and worked in marketing and communications at a startup. I was making almost $125,000 and still felt poor.
Capitalism makes us think we constantly need more: to shop more, to accumulate more, to keep up. I'm back in Tampa, where I grew up, because I didn't have the savings to sustain my life in LA.
I don't feel great about my ability to improve my situation through hard work alone. I've relentlessly networked to find a full-time job, taken on freelance work, and gotten a retail job. I'm working harder than I ever have and yet making significantly less money than before.
We're inheriting a system that feels ultimately outdated. Everything from private property and ownership to the climate crisis feels unsustainable. We're paying into Social Security, and that may not be there for us when we're retirement age.
Since my layoff, I've been reading a lot about economics and business. Is there another way that we could be doing things? My generation — millennials — is in favor of something kinder and more egalitarian than the policies we've seen since the Reagan era. Not because we're lazy or unwilling to work hard, but because we believe all people deserve basic rights and dignity, and that American exceptionalism is dead in the world.
Harish Bhandari, 64, Cape May, New Jersey. He retired from his job in the advertising industry at 59.
I'm happily retired. I spent my entire career in advertising and marketing — worked on Madison Avenue, then spent 23 or 24 years at an agency in Minneapolis, and 15 years at my last company.
Capitalism is the greatest economic system in the world. As long as you're willing to work hard over a long period of time, you're going to be rewarded, and success should follow.
I didn't grow up wealthy. I lived in Darien, Connecticut. My father was from India, and my mom was German. She grew up during the war and didn't go to college. My father passed away when I was 13. I'm not going to say we were poor, but we weren't wealthy. I'm thankful I've worked hard my whole life and made some good moves.
The obvious legacy my generation is leaving is that we're able to pass generational wealth to our kids. I'm an early baby boomer. Boomers get a hard time as far as having been lucky, but I think we've also worked very hard. Sometimes you create your own luck that way. We didn't have social media and cellphones, so we didn't have a lot of things bombarding us that would distract us from what we believed was important.
I currently have a very high level of trust in our economic institutions because it's about the free market. As long as the institutions provide security and stability, the market has always worked as far as this country has been around. When you try to start messing with that market, that's the problem.
Matthew Doutt, 25, Knoxville, Tennessee. He's an accountant.
In my senior year of high school, a military recruiter sat down with me and explained the average in-state college tuition. I didn't see any options to earn my degree that didn't involve the military or going into debt.
I knew college was expensive, and my parents were kind of pushing me toward the military for that reason. Once I enlisted, I realized many other people there were in the same boat, or very similar boats, as I was. I'm grateful for the benefits from the military, but my mental health was at an all-time low during my time in the Guard. It's a travesty that any American would need to sign a contract that could result in their death to pay for a degree without going into debt.
Even after I finished my bachelor's degree in 2022, the firm I started working at wasn't a good fit, so I left. I couldn't find work for four months. I was completely reliant on the Guard again, this time to pay my bills. That was another moment when I realized this system really isn't working as intended.
I now hold both my bachelor's and master's degrees, as well as a CPA license. I worked hard for them, but I wouldn't have been able to earn my bachelor's degree without the Guard, and I wouldn't have been able to get my CPA license without my firm paying for it.
I believe my generation has inherited difficult circumstances. Corporations are more concentrated, and the US DOJ has been less empowered than ever to break up monopolies.
I want to trust these major institutions and systems because they don't improve if you don't believe in them. At the same time, if what they're doing isn't good to begin with, it's kind of hard to trust them.
Jeremy Holmes, 40, lives in Denver. He is a senior developer in the furniture import industry.
My dad is what I'd call a bad capitalist, because he takes care of his employees. He owns an IT firm, and I worked for him until I was in my early 30s. He was a firm believer that hard work will get you far in life. And it did; he was a kid of immigrants, and he clawed his way out. My mom is Lakota, grew up on various reservations, and got out.
This story is part of Business Insider's series "The Future of Capitalism," which looks at ways Americans' confidence in capitalism has been eroding and what related changes in our economy mean for your work and wealth.
My parents have a very nice upper-middle-class life. They're not yacht-money people. My dad went from working as a 12 or 14-year-old in a print shop and has always had that "work hard and you will be rewarded" mentality. I was raised with that. Then I entered the workforce and started looking around. The hard workers aren't the ones who are getting paid the most.
I feel the people working in the factory are working much harder than the people on the other side of the office. I'm fortunate enough to be on that other side because I got a leg up from my parents. I don't see a way for people to claw their way into a comfortable living if they weren't born into it.
My main concern is being a programmer in the AI era. I've been doing this for most of my life. I can stay above it, but I'm more worried than I was before. I don't see how anyone can bring a child into this world and not be terrified for them. I have plenty of friends who are not doing as well, and I used to tell them to get into IT; I can't even tell them that anymore.
Jenni Abbott,71, lives in Antioch, IL. She works as a principal scientist.
I don't believe that hard work alone plays any significant role in an outcome. Not working hard can cost you your job. Working hard does not guarantee any sort of success.
I left the industry for about 20 years to be a stay-at-home mom of four kids. When I was 42, my husband died suddenly. I went into education. I was first a kindergarten aide for three years, and then a high school registrar for six. I was lucky enough to get a job as an associate toxicologist. We were literally running out of money at that point.
I've now been with the same company for over 20 years. While I'm not completely satisfied with how I was rewarded in my career, I also understand that I am doing better than a great number of people out there, and I'm relatively financially secure. One of the reasons I'm still working is that I don't want to be that poor.
I'm all for a mixed system. I believe capitalism is a good start, but I don't believe it's a good ending place. I believe that additional resources need to be there for it to be successful, and there needs to be support in place so everybody has the same chances at upward mobility.
I don't think we baby boomers lived up to our potential for what we should've left behind for the next generation. Social safety nets are important for a lot of people, and we could have done a much better job of preparing our country for that.
Kathy Curtis, 81, lives in California. She works part-time in customer service and data entry for a local water company.
I started out like everybody else with the expectation that you grow up, get married, have children, and live happily ever after, which is what we were taught. That didn't happen for me because within a year of following the plan, all of a sudden, I was a single parent. At one point, I was working four jobs.
I didn't have the strength to branch out into other fields of study or work to try to get ahead because I was so busy trying to just maintain everything. From my 20s to my 40s, I felt I could keep climbing up the hill. I think after my 40s, in general, that hill got steeper, and not as many people were able to climb it.
I'll struggle for the rest of my life. My main income at this point is Social Security, and I still work two days a week, earning $18 an hour in a customer service and data entry role for a local water company. I've learned how to not look like a poor person when I am one, and not live like one. So much of life is attitude.
Kirk Reynolds, 54, lives in Las Vegas. He is an architect.
I entered the workforce in 1997 and have spent the last 28 years working as an architect. I worry a lot about the future liquidity of Social Security because if we don't have Social Security in 10 years' time, I don't know what I'll do.
I'm fortunate to now own my home outright, but it took a lot of sacrifice over the years to get there. I didn't travel or spend a lot of extra money; it was a deliberate and challenging choice. However, wages have somewhat stalled out. I earn more now than I did when I started in the workforce, but after 28 years, I don't earn much more. I was around 28 when I started my 401(k), and I have less than $100,000 in it 20-some years later. I'll be lucky if there's $115,000 in there when I retire.
I think part of the problem is the boomer generation; they're among the oldest people in our society now, and a lot of them just haven't left the CEO roles, the managerial roles. I'm not sure if that's purely because they can't afford to retire, or if there's also an element of ego involved, but I'm 54, and I'm still waiting for them to finally pass the baton to the next generation.
I'm worried that my generation will be skipped because all of a sudden, when the leaders in their 70s and 80s finally retire, they'll give the roles to the 40-year-olds.
It's sad because I think Gen X would do a very good job of leading. We are the bridge generation, born at a time when we can recall how things were in the 1970s, and how things are now.
Gabrielle Benson, 29, lives in Chicago. She works in inclusion and experience at a tech company.
I'm on the cusp of millennial and Gen Z. There was so much transition, development, and growth that we came up through. Some people in my generation think capitalism is great and were able to benefit from that change, but a lot of us recognize its more negative impact.
We're coming from a background in the post-recession, post-Obama, post-social media era. We don't see the American dream as a gilded promise the way previous generations did.
I grew up Black and middle-class in Washington, DC. But I went to a private boarding school for high school, so I've had proximity to a lot of wealth. The experience of being at this school and then going home to my mom, who worked two jobs, compared to the other parents, who worked just as hard, but had institutional knowledge or advantages that we didn't, started opening my eyes. Hard work is not valued equally under this system.
Inequity is not a side effect of capitalism; it is a condition required for it to function. Instead of family stories about hard work granting stability or prosperity, we have stories about hard work being stolen or dismissed by the systems meant to reward it.
There are so many factors outside an average person's control that can determine their success: the job market, housing market, healthcare, race, sex, and gender. I have a corporate job, a degree, and retirement accounts, and it still feels like it can all be taken away by factors outside my control.
I think we have a lot of opportunities as millennials. We're still young; we can still make a lot of change, but I think it will require a lot of unlearning the knowledge we were passed down, like the idea that you just have to work hard.
I don't think that we're going to have a different system in our lifetime. Maybe that's something our grandkids might be able to experience. We're going to have to navigate and manage capitalism.Share your thoughts about capitalism in America by filling out our survey.
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Kenya plans to borrow 125 billion shillings ($969 million) in short-term syndicated loans this year to fund ongoing road construction, with plans to refinance the debt later through longer-term bonds backed by a 25 shillings-per-litre fuel levy.
Kenya plans to borrow 125 billion shillings ($969 million) in short-term syndicated loans this year to fund ongoing road construction, with plans to refinance the debt later through longer-term bonds backed by a 25 shillings-per-litre fuel levy.
This move will bring the total funds raised by securitising future fuel levy flows to 300 billion shillings, according to Bloomberg.
Last year, Kenya raised 175 billion shillings in syndicated loans, which were used primarily to settle outstanding payments to road contractors. According to Martin Agumbi, acting director-general of the Kenya Roads Board, the new loans will support ongoing projects.
“These funds will be used to support ongoing works given that we have already settled pending bills and told contractors to restart works,” Agumbi said in an interview.
DON'T MISS THIS: Germany to back Africa's richest country with €720m to move away from coal
Kenya will receive 60 billion shillings in bridge financing during the first half of the year, with the remainder arriving in the new fiscal year starting in July. The loans will be evenly split between local currency and dollars.
Facing limited fiscal space after anti-government protests in June 2024, the government under President William Ruto has increasingly turned to alternative financing, including privatisation and securitisation of the fuel levy, to fund infrastructure. Outstanding road projects are estimated at 890 billion shillings, far exceeding the annual roads budget of 55 billion shillings.
Under the plan, the new syndicated loans will be repaid by securitising five shillings per litre of the fuel levy. By law, Kenya can only securitise half of the 25 shillings-per-litre gasoline and diesel tax.
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Much like office snacks and flashy holiday parties, corporate wellness programs have always struck me as a bit of a scam — nice to have, but not at the expense of my job, salary, or a decent healthcare plan. Maybe that makes me a cynic, but in the zero-sum world of corporate budgets, if it comes down to layoffs vs. avocados, I'm fine skipping the avocados. Unfortunately (or fortunately), I'm not the one making those decisions.
Workplace wellness programs have exploded over the past decade or so, with companies rolling out a suite of subsidized perks, such as gym discounts, mental health apps, and other benefits aimed at attracting and retaining workers. The pandemic upped the ante even more — in the face of a tight labor market and a hyper-stressed workforce, plenty of business leaders looked around and thought, "Well, a Zoom meditation session can't hurt, right?"
Now, the ground is shifting. Corporations aren't cutting their wellness programs altogether, but they are taking a hard look at what they're paying for. They're cutting excessive, underutilized benefits, scrutinizing ROI, and shifting to more cost-effective, targeted products. They're trying to support employee well-being amid economic uncertainty and rising healthcare costs — without breaking the company piggybank.
Your job still wants to help you out with the gym, but it would rather you hit up Planet Fitness than Equinox. And, if it figures you've given up on your New Year's resolution to exercise already, it doesn't want to waste money on a benefit you'll never use.
In the 2010s, the millennial-driven flurry of "work-life balance" chatter nudged companies to invest more in the life end of things. A low-interest-rate environment made such spending easy to justify. Perhaps a smaller player couldn't compete with the tech giants' lavish perks, but many of them did pour money into products and services they hoped might support employee health and morale, to varying degrees of success.
"I don't know that anybody's told me that it's paid off. I mean, I don't hear companies saying, 'Our well-being program has been our secret to success," says Josh Bersin, global industry analyst and CEO of The Josh Bersin Company, a consultancy. "So it does not surprise me that this got really overbuilt and overhyped."
Now that companies are tightening their belts again, many of these ancillary perks are on the chopping block. Wellness is a fairly straightforward place to make spending reductions, as it falls in the optional category. Returns are hard to track, employee uptake is limited, and costs often balloon.
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Data Ramp Capital shows companies using its expense management platform have reduced wellness benefits for employees to $1,103 a year per worker in 2025 from $1,366 in 2023, a 20% decline. In turn, employees have upped their usage of budget-friendly apps such as Classpass and Wellhub and shifted toward lower-cost gyms.
"Benefits are being cut, and then as those benefits are being cut, people are spending at cheaper places on average," says Ara Kharazian, an economist at Ramp.
The cuts to these side benefits come as the cost of companies' major healthcare expenditure — the insurance they provide for their employees — continues to rise. Annual family premiums for employer insurance coverage increased by 6% to nearly $27,000 in 2025, per the Kaiser Family Foundation, and are expected to hit $30,000 this year. Employers say that controlling healthcare costs is their primary benefits objective, according to a recent MetLife survey, outweighing productivity, loyalty, and attracting talent.
"What they're doing in light of really large increases is they are going through every benefit," says Todd Katz, head of US group benefits at MetLife.
Cesar Carvalho, the CEO of Wellhub, which gives employees access to a network of gyms, studios, and classes, says one of the main appeals of his business is its price point, especially in this environment. "The value proposition of the company is very simple, they pay $2-$5 per employee per month, and that's it," he says.
If I had to make a bet, I would guess that you, the reader, do not fully understand the various wellness-related perks your job offers. That's OK! Neither do I! Companies have been spending a lot of money on corporate wellness — by one estimate, nearly $95 billion worldwide this year — without always checking whether it's effective.
One 2023 Deloitte survey found that 68% of workers don't use the full value of their company's well-being resources because the programs are too "time-consuming, confusing, or cumbersome" to access. A separate 2025 survey from Sapients Insights Group, a research and advisory firm, found that under a third of workers access their company's digital wellness platform monthly. Much of this stuff hasn't proven very impactful anyway: A 2024 study out of Oxford University in the UK found that employer offerings such as well-being apps, relaxation classes, and financial coaching generally didn't make workers better off. The exception: providing opportunities to volunteer. (Resilience and stress management training actually had a negative impact.)
Zachary Chertok, a senior research manager for employee experience at IDC, a market-intelligence firm, tells me that spending on physical and mental well-being is growing more strategic. Decisions around these products and services have historically been "top down and driven by internal company initiatives," he says. Essentially, someone in the C-suite or in HR decides there's going to be a wellness push, picks out whatever app(s) to implement it, and everyone moves on. Now, companies are getting smarter at identifying and spending on what's actually being used rather than what isn't. What this looks like in practice is businesses enlisting vendors that offer a potential suite of services or a central hub to manage a set of offerings, rather than contracting with a bunch of ad hoc programs. The model lets them choose which options they do and don't want to include and, over time, decipher what employees are using to refine the offer.
"As wellness spend matures, companies are thinking more about individual use and engagement cases and how spend can be mapped to it," Chertok says. New platforms that collect data on what people are using and what they aren't, he adds, helps "connect the dots on what is actually having an impact and working."
Essentially, if my work wellness platform realizes I'm never going to download the mental health app, it will stop bugging me about it, and if enough people do the same, it will alert my employer to drop the benefit.
Employers don't do all of this extra investing out of the kindness of their hearts. They do it because they think healthier employees will reduce their healthcare costs, take fewer sick days, and be more productive. That, in turn, saves the company money on their end of the insurance bill. From the employee perspective, it results in an awkward arrangement. For people who use the perks, the benefits are a plus, but workers can also feel like their bosses are simply trying to slap a band-aid-sized app onto a much larger problem of stress, burnout, and overwork.
A mindfulness workshop scheduled in the middle of the workday doesn't help an employee who's so overwhelmed they don't have 20 minutes for lunch. It also fosters animosity, as they wonder exactly who among the ranks actually has time for that. The way to build a healthy workplace culture is for the workplace to be holistically healthy: a financial health app doesn't do much if you're severely underpaid, a gym membership is useless if you're working 11-hour day, a video about stress management doesn't help you figure out how you're going to manage your new, sky-high insurance premiums.
"I think most people would rather have it go into their medical benefits because that's the big cost," Bersin says.
Business Insider is giving us ClassPass this year, and I am excited to use it — assuming I don't forget, which, TBD. We lost the reimbursement fitness benefit that came with our health insurance last year, which was more financially advantageous. I remind myself this benefit is an extra, not a requirement, and I hope my bosses know I'm OK if they cut it. I can learn to run outside.
Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.
Business Insider's Discourse stories provide perspectives on the day's most pressing issues, informed by analysis, reporting, and expertise.
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The leader of Ukraine's special drone branch said his operators are striking advancing Russian infantry at extreme close range, providing rare insight into how some of the country's best pilots are fighting.
Maj. Robert "Madyar" Brovdi, the commander of the Unmanned Systems Forces, wrote in a statement on Sunday that his pilots have, over the last month, been engaging enemy troops at an average strike depth of 1.44 km, or 0.89 miles, from the line of contact.
That's a roughly 15-minute brisk walk for the average person.
"This figure fluctuates, but: We are literally working under our feet," Madyar wrote.
His remarks reflect how top Ukrainian commanders in some areas have been prioritizing their limited resources. Using elite strike crews for short-range suppression could also be a sign of heightened pressure on Ukrainian lines.
The Unmanned Systems Forces is a relatively new elite formation in Ukraine that focuses on providing strike or reconnaissance support with smaller drones. Madyar, a prominent drone unit commander appointed to lead the group in June 2025, said on Sunday that his branch comprises 12 combat crews who are present on 30% of the front line.
Russia relies on ground infantry assaults to gradually take territory in Ukraine, and has been aggressively attempting to advance along some key frontline areas in recent months.
Madyar wrote that his units are assigned to corps commanders, who have been deploying the operators to attack such advancing troops at closer range.
"Not a single Corps commander, who has many hundreds of crews from their own brigades and subordinate units within their area of responsibility, is ready to release SBS work to proper depth," Madyar wrote, referring to the Unmanned Systems Forces as the SBS.
He added that this was due to Ukrainian commanders wanting to protect their troops in the trenches.
For Ukrainian soldiers, being sent to hold a trench is one of the war's most high-casualty tasks. They're often outnumbered by waves of attacking Russian troops, and typically need the help of friendly drone pilots to thwart assaults before they can get close.
But ideally, these drone operators try to spot and engage enemy infantry farther away, roughly 6 to 10 miles from the line of contact, as these troops form up or begin to launch assaults.
"To systematically reach proper depth, it is necessary to manage to create new crews, at least three times more than the current number," Madyar wrote. "The existing ones, for the most part, will remain in tactical depth."
Madyar also said infantry strikes have recently accounted for a larger share of his units' time.
According to him, the SBS has a usual goal of targeting infantry in 30% of its strikes, but nearly 40% of its successful attacks in December were against infantry, involving roughly 12,000 Russian soldiers.
Still, the commander wrote that in the SBS' entire history, the majority of its engagements have been against Russian equipment and logistics routes, at ranges of roughly 2.3 miles to 9.2 miles, depending on the type of system targeted.
Madyar's branch has struck over 1,200 "launch points" for Russian drone pilots, at an average depth of 2.25 miles, he added.
Elite drone units typically make a name for themselves by using small, inexpensive drones to strike priority air defense systems, logistics routes, or command posts deep behind enemy lines.
Indeed, Madyar had posted his statement on Sunday in response to what he said were recent criticisms that his units were focusing too much on strikes against Russian soldiers.
Madyar also wrote that not all SBS crews are equally contributing to these strike statistics.
"Only six to seven out of 12 SBS units are working at the desired pace; the others are catching up and need more time," his statement said.
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Ask this interview question the next time you want a break from practiced answers.
In an episode of the "Sourcery" podcast released on Saturday, Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy said he doesn't like typical questions, like what candidates did at work. He said interviewees respond with projects and chatbots that made their work more efficient — answers that don't reveal much about the person.
"So all practiced answers, I don't like them," he said. "I'll ask them questions like, 'Tell me how you changed yourself.'"
Prior to becoming Snowflake's CEO in 2024, Ramaswamy was a partner at Greylock Ventures and cofounded AI search startup Neeva, which was acquired by Snowflake.
"To me, the combination of drive and malleability, those are the prized qualities that set the truly amazing people apart from everyone else, especially at a moment like this," he said on Saturday's podcast.
As tech execs race to hire top talent that can adapt and thrive with AI, they're getting creative with how they gauge the X-factor in interviews.
In a podcast published last week, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke said he asks one question to easily identify employees who will adapt quickly and perform well in a crisis.
He said he asks them: "Have you started a company before?"
He said that it was a way to gauge people with entrepreneurial skills who relate to his challenges as a founder.
Dayforce chief people officer Amy Cappellanti-Wolf told Business Insider that she asks about recent constructive feedback that a candidate is actively working on.
She said she's open to personal or professional responses and looks forward to hearing genuine answers. She said she finds it a "problem" if candidates say they don't get feedback or have nothing they're trying to fix.
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Anna Kendrick, 40, says watching her friends go to college made her second-guess her decision to pursue acting.
"I was really, really jealous of all my friends that were going to college. Number one, because I felt really insecure about not going to college. I have a whole, you know, complex about it," Kendrick said on Friday's episode of "Call Her Daddy."
Seeing her friends quickly build community through classes and sororities made her feel even more unsure as she tried to find her footing in Los Angeles.
"I was 17 or 18. It's really hard to make friends in LA because of, like, the way the city is laid out, but especially when you don't have a fake ID. Even if I did, I looked about 12, so that wasn't going to work anyway," Kendrick said. "And I was just like absolutely terrified and really wondering if I was like, making a huge mistake."
Her perspective began to change when her friends hit sophomore year and had to start figuring out their future paths.
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"Even though the thing that I wanted felt like a total pipe dream, and like, 'What am I doing? This is a disaster. It's so hard to carve out a space for yourself in this industry,'" Kendrick said.
"But on the other side of it, holy shit, I did not think like, what a blessing to just know what I want. I was like watching all my friends go, 'Oh my god, I don't know what I want, what to do,'" she continued.
The "Pitch Perfect" star said her decision not to go to college felt especially difficult because it went against the path her family valued.
"I was like the first person to not go to college. And my dad was a teacher and everything, so it was like very black sheep behavior to not go to college," Kendrick said.
She added her parents weren't thrilled with her decision, but accepted that she was going to do what she wanted. At the same time, her parents saw college as something she could revisit if acting didn't work out.
"I think there was always that sense of like, well, if things maybe don't work out that first year, it's not too late to just, you know, so I think that was always like something that they had in mind," Kendrick said.
It also didn't help that questions about college kept coming up when she was in her early 20s, before her acting career had fully taken off.
"Like, oh my god, I have to say I didn't. And at that point, you know, like 21, 22, I didn't really have much to show for it yet," Kendrick said.
Kendrick isn't the only Hollywood celebrity who has spoken about not going to college.
"Harry Potter" star Daniel Radcliffe told E! News in 2013 that he skipped college because he "already knew" what he wanted to do.
"I think a large part of why people go to college is to figure out what they want to do," he said. "I very much knew what I wanted to do, so I kind of just figured I'd keep carrying on trying to do that."
In 2024, Julia Roberts told British Vogue that she regrets not going to university.
"It wasn't in my cards," Roberts said, adding that her family didn't have the money and she "had no scholarship potential."
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As a frequent traveler, I fell in love with Thailand's diverse landscapes, rich culture, and — best of all — the food. So when I experienced career burnout in 2024 after five years in Hong Kong and needed a soft landing, Thailand felt like an instant safe haven.
I knew it like the back of my hand (or so I thought), and with the introduction of the digital nomad DTV visa that same year, the leap felt like a no-brainer.
Living here has largely lived up to my expectations. Still, the shift from enthusiastic visitor to long-term resident came with challenges I hadn't anticipated.
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I began my new life with a three-month immersion in Bangkok, my favorite city in the world. I wanted a familiar landing pad and the festive energy. I learned that even favorites have their downsides.
The city's relentless buzz — thrilling at first — slowly became overwhelming. The constant motion, traffic, and density fueled my anxiety. In a metropolis so vast, finding genuine silence or peace felt nearly impossible. I often wanted to switch it all off, but Bangkok doesn't come with an off switch.
As a remote freelancer, I had the freedom to chase a different dream by moving to Phuket. For anyone who's ever wondered what it's like to live there, it really does feel like paradise with a permanent holiday vibe. Even so, I realized how little I'd truly known it as a tourist. I keep discovering corners I'd never seen before.
Then high season arrived. My peaceful paradise transformed into an overtourism nightmare, especially in December and January. Secret beaches swarmed with festival-like crowds, and daily routines fell apart. Food deliveries took hours, shops ran out of staples, and transport apps like Grab and Bolt were overwhelmed.
On one recent beach day, I couldn't book a ride home for nearly three hours, leaving me stranded in a roadside meltdown. My Zen mood quickly gave way to frustration.
Ironically, on an island packed with people, making real connections has felt harder than in Bangkok. With tourists constantly coming and going, most interactions are fleeting. Expat communities exist, but they're scattered and often divided by nationality. Even amid the crowds, island life can feel surprisingly lonely.
Then there's the bureaucracy. Thailand operates with a certain fluidity that can be confusing. Laws around visas, business, and property don't change often, but their interpretation can vary wildly between offices, officers, and provinces.
Take the 90-day reporting rule. It requires expats to report to immigration every 90 days, an outdated system that often pushes people to do quick "visa runs" instead of spending a full day in line. Many newcomers don't learn about it until they're hit with a hefty fine.
I've since joined expat groups just to keep up with the ever-shifting rules.
Thailand's sex industry is impossible to ignore in heavy tourist zones. Living here, I've had to build a certain emotional distance from it. When I first arrived in Phuket, I stayed in a room next to a tourist who was clearly there for that purpose. For a week straight, I was an unwilling audience to noisy transactions — until I finally complained to management.
And as a foreigner, you're often placed in the "tourist" box by default. I thought Tinder might be a way to meet people. Instead, half my matches offered a "massage" rather than a conversation.
Thailand is known for its affordability, but a clear divide still exists between local and foreign pricing. You have to stay vigilant to avoid overpaying. The reward comes with time. As I've settled in and become a regular at local markets and shops, I'm now greeted with smiles — and the occasional "special price."
That, in the end, is what makes all the headaches fade.
For every moment of frustration, there are many more filled with beauty, incredible food, and genuine kindness. The trade-offs are real, and the challenges come with the territory.
But most days, when I look around at the place I now call home, the struggles feel like a small price to pay for living in a real-life paradise.
Do you have a story to share about living abroad? Contact the editor at akarplus@businessinsider.com.
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Rosalia Mazza
Monday, January 26th 2026 07:36 PM
Riyad Bank's innovation arm Jeel has partnered with Ripple to test blockchain-based cross-border payments and digital asset services in Saudi Arabia through a regulatory sandbox aligned with Vision 2030 goals.
Riyad Bank's innovation arm Jeel has partnered with Ripple to test blockchain-based cross-border payments and digital asset services in Saudi Arabia through a regulatory sandbox aligned with Vision 2030 goals.
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Jeel, the innovation arm of Riyad Bank, has entered into a partnership with blockchain company Ripple to test new financial services built on distributed ledger technology. The collaboration will focus on cross-border payments and future digital asset use cases within Saudi Arabia.
Under the agreement, both sides will run technology trials inside Jeel's regulatory sandbox. The controlled environment allows financial institutions and technology providers to test new systems under regulatory oversight before broader market deployment.
The partnership comes as Saudi Arabia continues to expand digital infrastructure across banking and payments. Officials and financial institutions have linked these efforts to the country's Vision 2030 program, which aims to modernize economic systems and increase private-sector participation in technology-driven services.
Jeel and Ripple plan to evaluate whether blockchain-based tools can support faster international transactions, stronger transparency, and operational reliability while meeting regulatory requirements.
The initial focus of the partnership centers on international remittances and payment corridors. Cross-border transfers remain a core challenge for banks and corporate clients due to settlement delays, intermediary costs, and limited transaction visibility.
Jeel and Ripple will examine blockchain-enabled corridors designed to reduce friction in international payments. The testing phase will assess how Ripple's infrastructure performs when handling real transaction flows inside a sandbox setting.
Saudi Arabia plays a significant role in global remittance activity, both as a destination for expatriate workers and as a regional financial hub. Improving the speed and efficiency of outbound and inbound transfers remains a priority for banks serving corporate and retail clients.
The partnership aims to determine whether blockchain tools can support these goals while fitting into the country's regulatory framework.
Jeel operates its sandbox as a testing platform that balances innovation with regulatory discipline. The Ripple collaboration will run through this framework, allowing both companies to examine performance benchmarks and compliance standards at the same time.
Testing will include technical performance, transaction processing capacity, system stability, and data security controls. Regulatory alignment remains a central requirement throughout the process.
Executives at Jeel have said the sandbox model allows controlled experimentation with emerging financial infrastructure. The approach reflects a broader trend across the region, where regulators increasingly support structured testing environments for new payment systems and digital services.
For Ripple, participation in the sandbox offers access to a regulated testing environment tied directly to a major Saudi bank.
Beyond payments, the partnership will also examine digital asset custody and tokenization frameworks. These areas have gained attention across financial markets as institutions look for secure ways to manage blockchain-based assets.
Jeel and Ripple plan to test systems that support asset storage, transaction authorization, and operational controls. The goal involves identifying methods that meet security standards while remaining scalable for institutional use.
Tokenization, which converts traditional assets into blockchain-based representations, also forms part of the evaluation. Financial institutions view tokenization as a potential tool for improving settlement efficiency and asset management processes.
Any deployment in this area will depend on regulatory approval and performance results from the sandbox phase.
The partnership provides Ripple with direct access to Saudi Arabia's regulated financial innovation network. Through Jeel's institutional channels, Ripple will test its enterprise blockchain platforms within the national financial environment.
Ripple's regional leadership has described Saudi Arabia as an important market for digital transformation. The company views sandbox participation as an opportunity to demonstrate how its technology operates under regulatory oversight rather than in isolated pilot projects.
The collaboration also allows Ripple to assess local infrastructure requirements, regulatory expectations, and operational workflows unique to the Saudi banking system.
For Saudi institutions, working with an established blockchain provider offers exposure to enterprise-grade platforms already used in other regions.
Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 strategy places digital finance at the center of economic reform. The program encourages banks and technology firms to develop payment systems that support trade, investment, and financial inclusion.
Jeel's partnership with Ripple reflects that direction. By testing blockchain infrastructure within a regulated environment, the project fits into broader national efforts to strengthen digital financial services.
Authorities have emphasized the importance of maintaining financial stability while introducing new technologies. Sandbox programs provide a mechanism to meet both objectives.
The Ripple collaboration adds an international technology partner to this framework, connecting local banking innovation with global blockchain expertise.
Jeel operates as Riyad Bank's innovation arm, responsible for exploring emerging technologies and testing new financial products. The Ripple partnership builds on the bank's broader digital strategy, which includes upgrading payment infrastructure and expanding digital banking services.
Riyad Bank remains one of Saudi Arabia's largest financial institutions, serving corporate, retail, and government clients. Its innovation unit plays a role in evaluating technologies before large-scale deployment across the bank's operations.
Blockchain experimentation fits into this approach. Rather than adopting systems directly into production, the bank uses sandbox testing to assess risk, reliability, and regulatory impact.
This method reflects a cautious but structured approach to financial innovation.
Across the Gulf region, banks and regulators have increased interest in blockchain technology for payments, trade finance, and digital asset services. Several countries have launched regulatory sandboxes and pilot programs tied to digital currencies and settlement systems.
Saudi Arabia's financial authorities have taken steps to support controlled experimentation while maintaining oversight. The Jeel-Ripple partnership follows this pattern by combining international technology with domestic regulatory supervision.
The Middle East also plays a growing role in cross-border trade between Asia, Europe, and Africa. Payment infrastructure improvements remain tied to broader economic integration efforts.
Blockchain-based systems have attracted attention as tools that can reduce settlement time and operational complexity across borders.
The partnership highlights the growing role of fintech collaboration between banks and technology firms. Traditional financial institutions increasingly work with specialized providers rather than building all infrastructure internally.
Ripple brings blockchain expertise, while Jeel provides regulatory access and institutional integration. This model reflects how banks adopt new technology while maintaining control over compliance and risk management.
The arrangement also supports Riyad Bank's efforts to position itself as an active participant in digital finance development across Saudi Arabia.
Industry observers note that such partnerships often determine whether experimental technology transitions into mainstream banking operations.
Any expansion beyond sandbox testing will depend on regulatory approval and performance results. Saudi regulators continue to evaluate how blockchain systems fit within existing financial laws and consumer protection frameworks.
Issues such as data privacy, transaction monitoring, and asset custody controls remain central to these assessments.
The sandbox environment allows regulators to observe real-world performance without exposing the broader financial system to untested risk.
This oversight process plays a central role in shaping how digital finance evolves across the Kingdom.
Jeel and Ripple have not released a timeline for completing sandbox testing or moving into production deployments. The next phase will involve performance evaluation, compliance review, and operational assessment.
If results meet regulatory and institutional standards, the partnership could expand into live payment corridors or digital asset services offered through Riyad Bank's platforms.
Any such rollout would occur in stages and under continued regulatory supervision.
For now, the focus remains on testing, validation, and system evaluation.
The Jeel-Ripple partnership represents a structured approach to blockchain adoption in Saudi Arabia's financial sector. Rather than rapid deployment, the project emphasizes testing, compliance, and operational readiness.
Cross-border payments, digital asset custody, and tokenization remain complex areas that require both technical capability and regulatory coordination.
By using a sandbox model, Riyad Bank's innovation arm and Ripple aim to determine whether blockchain tools can meet institutional standards inside one of the region's largest banking markets.
The outcome of these tests will influence how quickly blockchain-based services move from controlled trials into everyday banking operations across Saudi Arabia.
Blockchain
Ripple has secured expanded approval from Singapore's Monetary Authority, allowing the company to scale regulated blockchain-based payment services and strengthen RLUSD and XRP adoption across the region.
Blockchain
Tether has invested in fintech firm Parfin to support institutional USDT adoption and strengthen blockchain-based settlement tools across Latin America, deepening its presence in a region with fast-growing digital asset activity.
Blockchain
BlackRock is prioritizing tokenized ETFs as it builds technology to bring on-chain assets to mainstream finance, awaiting clearer regulation.
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Analysis suggests a whopping 95 percent of NFTs are now worthless.
by
Eileen Kinsella
January 26, 2026
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Nifty Gateway, one of the earliest online marketplaces for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), has announced it will shut down effective February 23 amid a sharp drop in activity.
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The platform has already “entered withdrawal-only mode,” according to a notification on its website, which advises members: “Please withdraw your assets by this date.” After February 23, “you will no longer be able to list, purchase, bid on, or sell NFTs on Nifty Gateway. You will still be able to withdraw your NFTs and funds,” according to the site.
Nifty Gateway was founded in 2018 by twins Duncan and Griffin Cock Foster as a platform where NFTs could be easily bought and sold using cryptocurrency or fiat. In 2019, it was snapped up by cryptocurrency exchange Gemini, founded by another pair of twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, as its first-ever acquisition. At the time, the Fosters and Winklevosses believed NFTs would play a major role in the next era of the digital economy. And for a short time, they did.
In 2021, the platform reported $300 million in gross merchandise value, its profile boosted by its partnership with Sotheby's for the auction house's $17 million NFT drop with Pak.
“Since launching, Nifty supported dozens of innovative drops and brought new creative experiences to life,” Gemini noted in its recent announcement. “We are incredibly proud of the work the Nifty team has pioneered and grateful to Nifty Gateway's customers and artists for joining us on this journey.”
Beeple, Everydays – The First 5000 Days. Courtesy of the artist and Christie's.
Interest in and prices of NFTs spiked during lockdowns, most prominently with Christie's first-ever sale of digital artist Beeple‘s The First 5000 Days, which soared to a final reported price of $69.3 million in 2021.
The boom saw a proliferation of NFT platforms, with major auction houses launching Web3 initiatives, from Sotheby's Metaverse to Christie's digital art department. Brands such as Louis Vuitton and Nike got in on the action; Bored Ape NFTs were trotted out on late-night talk shows.
However, the bubble has popped. As recently detailed by the Independent, the NFT market collapsed with estimated trading volumes dropping from a peak of $4 billion to roughly $800 million within a single year. It pointed to research that found that “95 percent of NFTs are now totally worthless.”
Christie's, which helped jumpstart the frenzy with its Beeple sale, quietly closed its digital art department last fall. The house “made a strategic decision to reformat digital art sales,” a spokesperson told Now Media at the time. “The company will continue to sell digital art within the larger 20th and 21st Century Art category.” In 2024, Sotheby's laid off most of its Metaverse and NFT team, retaining only three staffers.
By that point, digital platforms including Async Art, KnownOrigin, MakersPlace, and LG Art Lab had already shuttered. Analysis by DappRadar noted that the trading volume of art NFTs fell from a high of $2.97 billion in 2021 to $197 million in 2024.
Current Nifty Gateway users who hold an NFT and a balance of USD or ETH will be notified by Gemini on how to move their assets off the platform and onto the Gemini ecosystem, the company said. It added that NFTs will continue to be supported through the Gemini wallet. “This decision will allow Gemini to sharpen its focus and execute on the vision of building a one-stop super app for customers,” the announcement reads.
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The stability of a major global currency is hanging in the balance, and the ripple effects are zeroing in on Bitcoin, at least in the short-term.
This shift revolves around the potential for a coordinated currency intervention by the Federal Reserve, according to a Bloomberg report. After the New York Fed conducted a rate check—a procedural move often preceding market action—the Japanese yen surged 3.39% from last Friday's low. It now trades at 153.95 yen to the dollar, a level not seen since early November 2025.
This matters because a stronger yen threatens to unwind one of the world's most pervasive investment strategies, directly impacting the liquidity that has buoyed risk assets like Bitcoin for years.
The move comes after a week of turmoil in Japan, where a sharp selloff pushed the nation's 40-year government bond yield to 4%, a level last seen at its 2007 debut.
In this fragile macro environment, Bitcoin's behavior is increasingly dictated by traditional finance flows. It has largely failed to rally amid shifting policies and geopolitics, posting a mere 0.14% gain year-to-date, according to CoinGecko data, while gold and silver climb to new highs.
For decades, Japan's near-zero interest rates have fueled the "carry trade," where investors borrow cheap yen to buy higher-yielding assets abroad, including U.S. stocks and Bitcoin.
If the yen weakens, these trades become more profitable on paper. But a sudden, coordinated intervention to strengthen the yen—involving the Fed selling dollars to buy yen—forces a rapid reversal.
This dynamic hits Bitcoin directly, as its short-term price is primarily determined by leveraged capital, Tim Sun, senior researcher at HashKey Group, told Decrypt.
Investors must now sell those risk assets to buy back yen and close their loans, creating a wave of selling pressure.
“Rising expectations of intervention directly lifted the volatility premium, sharply increasing the cost of holding leveraged positions,” Sun said. “This, in turn, forced capital to exit Bitcoin.”
With reports about the NY Fed's rate checks, investors are worried about a joint intervention that could involve the printing of U.S. dollars to buyback Yen to backstop the Japanese currency decline.
This dynamic explains recent selling across crypto and equities as the yen has strengthened.
“Rising expectations of intervention directly lifted the volatility premium, sharply increasing the cost of holding leveraged positions,” Sun said. “This, in turn, forced capital to exit Bitcoin.”
The ripple effects could be severe.
A forced unwinding of these leveraged positions could further destabilize bond markets and global liquidity, echoing the August 2024 carry-trade blowup that sent Bitcoin below $50,000 and triggered over $1 billion in liquidations.
Sun noted, however, that the current impact is unlikely to exceed that event, as overall risk appetite among leveraged players is now lower than in 2024.
What Is a Carry Trade and What Does It Have to Do With the Bitcoin Crash?
While this deleveraging poses a clear short-term threat to Bitcoin's price, the longer-term monetary consequences could be powerfully bullish, experts told Decrypt.
If the Fed intervenes by selling dollars, it effectively expands dollar liquidity—a form of money printing. This weakens the U.S. dollar, which is already near multi-month lows, and boosts global liquidity.
Bitcoin, Ethereum ETFs Bleed as Crypto Funds Lose $1.73 Billion, Largest Since November
For a new, sustained rally to take hold, Sun said the market would need to see “a decline in yen FX volatility, followed by USD weakening,” confirming a structural shift toward broader liquidity easing.
Such an environment historically acts as a tailwind for scarce, "hard money" assets like Bitcoin.
For a sustained rally, Sun said the market would need to see “a decline in yen FX volatility, followed by USD weakening,” confirming a structural shift toward broader liquidity easing.
Arthur Hayes, former CEO of BitMEX and a prominent macro commentator, has called this scenario "extremely boolish," in a Saturday tweet.
“This assumes Fed prints dollars, creates banking reserves. dollars are then sold to buy yen. If the Fed is manipulating the yen, we will see its b/s grow via the Foreign currency denominated assets line item, which comes out weekly in the H.4.1 release.”
This view is gaining traction: the immediate pain of a carry-trade unwind may soon give way to a powerful rotation into Bitcoin as investors seek a hedge against a deliberately diluted dollar. Until that pivot, however, Sun expects pressure to persist.
“Until the yen stabilizes and intervention risks are fully priced out, global risk appetite will remain compressed, and Bitcoin prices will continue to face material downside pressure,” he said.
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This has been years in the making. A few weeks ago, Zama announced its launch on mainnet with the first Confidential USDT (cUSDT) transfer on Ethereum. Over the last few days, the Zama Public Auction became the first production application built on the Zama Protocol, demonstrating real-world usage and scalability.
The Zama auction app was the most-used application on Ethereum on January 24th, above USDT, USDC, and Uniswap. It took Zama only 3 days to grow Total Value Shielded (TVS) above $100m, something that took other Ethereum-based privacy protocols multiple years. The protocol experienced no downtime, and was able to keep up with the throughput of Ethereum itself, proving that FHE is now production-ready and can be used at scale by anyone building a financial application on the blockchain.
The Zama ICO was done through a confidential sealed-bid Dutch auction.
After studying more than a hundred TGEs, we found that auctions offer the best balance of fair distribution, price discovery, and capital efficiency. In a Dutch auction, the clearing price isn't the highest bid, it's the lowest price at which a bid gets filled. Confidentiality is critical: when participants can see others' bids, price discovery becomes distorted as people react to one another rather than bidding what they truly believe.
Participants picked a price (public) and an amount (private). Nobody could see how much they were bidding for, not other bidders, not bots, not us. When the auction closed, the clearing price was calculated homomorphically, directly on encrypted data.
The auction ran from January 21–24, 2026.
The Zama Public Sale accounting for 12% of the initial supply and is handled in three segments:
The upcoming pre-TGE sale will give a chance to participants who did not get their bids filled in the auction to buy $ZAMA tokens at the auction clearing price, with a $10k participation cap.
Claiming opens February 2nd. $ZAMA tokens will be distributed as standard ERC-20 tokens, fully unlocked and immediately usable for paying encryption and decryption fees on the Zama Protocol.
All $ZAMA holders can stake their tokens on their choice of operators to earn rewards and help secure the Zama Protocol.
Using the Zama Portfolio, anybody can start to shield and send confidential tokens.
Finally, blockchain gets its HTTPS moment, and the days of fully transparent transactions are behind us.
The Zama Public Auction became the first production application built on the Zama Protocol, demonstrating real-world scalability.
Read more →
Everything that goes onchain will eventually be encrypted, and it starts today with the Zama Public Auction.
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Learn how $ZAMA is used in the protocol and how staking rewards are distributed.
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Amid a global rise in cryptocurrency‑related crime, Israeli start-up Lionsgate Network is drawing increased attention from both attackers and regulators as it positions itself as a central player in the race to trace and recover stolen digital assets.
While the crypto world has long been associated with anonymity and untraceable transactions, Lionsgate Network specializes in blockchain forensics to expose even the most sophisticated criminal or terror networks.
“Crypto is an asset, an exchange, coded on blockchain. That means we can see it wherever it is. And when crime is involved, we can help,” Bezalel Raviv, CEO and founder of Lionsgate Network, told The Jerusalem Post ahead of Cybertech 2026. “There are no more blind spots, no more zero-accountability, no more ‘We don't know.'”
The company has built its reputation on rapid blockchain analysis and close cooperation with investigative authorities in the United States, including Homeland Security, the IRS, and other international agencies, to provide airtight evidence for seizure orders.
This emphasis on institutional collaboration has become a central part of Lionsgate Network's identity, particularly as governments and law enforcement agencies worldwide struggle to keep pace with the scale of crypto‑related crime.
“This is a huge tumor in the financial world,” Raviv said. “Cybercriminals are using artificial intelligence (AI) to attack individuals at the end of the tunnel, not the network.”
With losses totaling tens of billions of dollars each year from digital fraud, Lionsgate Network is part of a new wave of firms leveraging AI to track stolen assets in real time. Raviv told the Post that the company focuses on helping individuals rather than just large companies or institutions.
Lionsgate Network uses advanced monitoring systems that can determine whether a case is recoverable in under 10 seconds. If the case has a viable recovery path, law enforcement typically takes about a week to seize the hacked funds. If the case is not viable, Lionsgate Network will not take it.
One of Lionsgate Network's core innovations is NemesisAI, the fusion of blockchain forensics with real-time OSINT intelligence. And according to Raviv, every crypto transaction leaves two parallel trails.
“The blockchain trail, mapping precisely where funds originated and how they moved across wallets, protocols, and platforms, down to the smallest unit. And the OSINT trail, connecting wallets to real-world entities, infrastructure, and behavioral patterns behind the transactions. While OSINT data is not always immediately visible, our AI models continuously learn and improve detection exponentially, increasing attribution accuracy over time.”
The rise of Lionsgate Network comes at a moment of unprecedented vulnerability for crypto users. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center now receives thousands of fraud reports each day, many involving elaborate investment schemes that target victims across North America, Europe, and the Middle East.
The company found that “in the US alone, over $53 billion is embezzled annually through cyber-enabled financial fraud. The FBI's IC3 reports roughly 6,000 new cybercrime complaints per day, yet based on victim behavior, we estimate that only about one in 15 incidents is actually reported, suggesting the real numbers are significantly higher,” Raviv said.
Lionsgate Network is seeing similar growth curves across Europe and Latin America.
And, according to Raviv, “at the current trajectory, global digital fraud losses are projected to approach $1 trillion annually by 2029.”
Against this, Lionsgate Network has stepped into a vacuum left by traditional financial institutions, which often lack the tools or jurisdiction to intervene or dismiss victims by telling them that their funds cannot be recovered.
While most attacks are state-backed, the majority by Iran and North Korea, terror groups have also been highly involved in money laundering, including in cryptocurrency. Lionsgate Network has been central in seizing terror funds from Hamas, Raviv told The Post.
“On October 10, 2023, I was in Switzerland when I got a call from the Prime Minister's Office requesting that Lionsgate Networks block cryptocurrency suspected of belonging to Hamas. It was the easiest campaign. The wallets belonged to Hamas operatives that were active on X, and we were able to help authorities seize over $100 million in cryptocurrency with our intelligence,” he said.
According to Raviv, the company found dozens of other Hamas wallets that had not been previously identified.
In November, some 300 American victims of Hamas' Oct. 7 slaughter of Israelis sued Binance and its founder for facilitating millions of dollars in payments to the group. According to reports, the complaint accused Binance of knowingly enabling Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) move over $1 billion through its platform.
After Binance pleaded guilty two years earlier, in November 2023, and paid a $4.32 billion penalty, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange continued to launder millions of dollars for the terror groups.
As digital assets become more deeply embedded in global finance, the need for specialized forensic expertise will only grow. As crypto scams grow and evolve, Lionsgate Network will continue to expose them.
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BitMine Immersion Technologies, a New York–listed company chaired by Fundstrat's Tom Lee, has quietly built one of the largest concentrated positions in Ethereum ever disclosed by a single entity.
In an update published on January 26, BitMine said it now holds 4,243,338 ether, giving the company control of roughly 3.52% of Ethereum's total circulating supply.
At the time of disclosure, the position was valued at roughly $12 billion, making BitMine the largest Ethereum treasury in the world and the second-largest crypto treasury overall, behind Strategy Inc., formerly Strategy, which holds more than 700,000 bitcoin.
The disclosure shows how quickly BitMine's balance sheet has expanded over the past six months.
Weekly purchase data shared by the company indicates steady accumulation since late October, 2025, with particularly large buying activity in December.
In the week ending January 26 alone, BitMine added just over 40,000 ETH, following purchases of more than 35,000 ETH the prior week and several six-figure ETH buys in December.
Last week the company bought the dip, purchasing $110M worth of Ethereum.
The pace of accumulation has continued even as ether prices softened, with ETH down double digits over the past month amid broader market volatility.
Ethereum is currently trading at $2,940.44, showing a 2.0% increase over the past hour, which suggests short-term buying pressure returning to the market.
Source: Cryptonews
On a 24-hour basis, ETH is up a modest 0.4%, indicating relatively stable price action despite broader market fluctuations.
However, over the past seven days, Ethereum has declined by 8.4%, reaching as low as $2,787.
Source: Bitmine
BitMine's total crypto, cash, and equity holdings now stand at $12.8 billion, according to the company.
In addition to its Ethereum position, the firm holds 193 bitcoin, $682 million in cash, a $200 million stake in Beast Industries, and a smaller equity position in Eightco Holdings.
The company trades on the NYSE American under the ticker BMNR and was last priced around $28.50, down modestly on the day and slightly lower over the past week.
The Ethereum accumulation is central to BitMine's stated long-term strategy, as it has publicly set a goal of acquiring 5% of Ethereum's total supply, a target it refers to as the “alchemy of 5%.”
Based on current supply estimates, reaching that level would require roughly 6 million ETH.
At current market prices, closing that gap would require several billion dollars in additional capital.
Beyond holding ether on its balance sheet, BitMine is also expanding its staking operations. As of January 25, the company had staked 2,009,267 ETH, worth about $5.7 billion, representing nearly half of its total holdings.
Source: Bitmine
Using the composite Ethereum staking rate of roughly 2.81%, BitMine estimates that a fully deployed staking strategy could generate about $374 million in annual fees, or more than $1 million per day.
For now, the company relies on external staking providers, but it plans to launch its infrastructure, known as the Made in America Validator Network, or MAVAN, in early 2026.
Chairman Tom Lee has framed the Ethereum strategy as a long-term bet on institutional adoption of blockchain technology.
Speaking after last week's World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Lee said discussions among policymakers and business leaders increasingly point to the convergence of traditional finance, crypto, and artificial intelligence.
He pointed to Ethereum's role in tokenization and financial infrastructure projects as evidence that Wall Street is already building on the network.
Read original story Tom Lee's BitMine Corners 3.5% of Ethereum Supply as Treasury Tops With 4.24M ETH Buy by Hassan Shittu at Cryptonews.com
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The North Korean threat group is using a new PowerShell backdoor to compromise development environments and target cryptocurrency holdings, according to researchers.
January 26, 2026
North Korean threat actors are once again targeting developers with an ongoing phishing campaign, this time with a specific focus that goes outside the usual geographic scope and demonstrates the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to develop a novel backdoor.
The advanced persistent threat (APT) group Konni has been targeting developers with expertise in and access to blockchain-related resources and infrastructure across the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, including Japan, Australia, and India, Check Point Research revealed in a recent blog post. In previous threat campaigns, Konni primarily focused on government and politically and academically affiliated targets in South Korea, which means the targeting extends "beyond the group's usual focus areas," according to the post.
The activity — which use phishing lures that appear to be legitimate project documentation — also shows the group deviating from its usual tactics and targets, signaling a potential redirection of activity, Check Point said.
"The targeting reflects a notable shift in behavior," according to the post. "Instead of focusing on individual end users, the campaign goal seems to be to establish a foothold in development environments, where compromise can provide broader downstream access across multiple projects and services."
Related:'CrashFix' Scam Crashes Browsers, Delivers Malware
Indeed, threat actors tied to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) are notorious for targeting software developers, in particular through sweeping job-recruitment campaigns known as Contagious Interview and Wagemole. As mentioned, however, those campaigns were more individual-focused, while this one seems more aimed at long-term persistence.
Another notable aspect of the campaign is that it uses an AI-written PowerShell backdoor, reflecting the increasing adoption of AI tools by threat actors. Indeed, 2026 is already poised to be the year that AI-generated malware appears in earnest. For example, Check Point recently documented how a complex Linux malware framework, dubbed VoidLink, was built almost entirely with the AI-coding assistant TRAE SOLO.
The Konni backdoor used in this latest campaign has "an unusually polished structure," with upfront documentation that Check Point researchers said is unusual for commodity or APT-authored PowerShell implants. That documentation describes the script's functionality — to ensure that only one instance of this UUID-based project runs at a time and to send system info via HTTP GET every 13 minutes — in clear and readable terms. It's also further divided into well-defined, logical sections that each handle a specific task, which reflects "modern software engineering conventions rather than ad-hoc malware development," according to the blog post.
Related:Russia's Fancy Bear APT Doubles Down on Global Secrets Theft
"Konni's introduction of AI-assisted tooling suggests an effort to accelerate development and standardize code while continuing to rely on proven delivery methods and social engineering," Check Point said.
The lure documents used in the campaign demonstrate its focus on blockchain developers and also are a departure for Konni, which typically uses weaponized documents with geopolitical themes focused on the Korean Peninsula.
In this case, the lures appear to be legitimate development-project materials and include technical details such as architecture, technology stacks, development timelines, and, in some cases, even budgets and delivery milestones, according to Check Point.
"This pattern suggests an intent to compromise development environments, thereby obtaining access to sensitive assets, including infrastructure, API credentials, wallet access, and ultimately cryptocurrency holdings," read the post.
While this blockchain and cryptocurrency focus is more commonly associated with other DPRK-linked actors, there are indications that Konni — a subset of the more formidable APT Kimsuky — also engaged in similar financially motivated targeting in the past, according to Check Point.
Related:Attackers Exploit Zero-Day in End-of-Life D-Link Routers
With APTs using new tools like AI and shifting tactics in campaigns that are evolving quickly, defenders also must be on high alert to the changing nature of these activities, according to Check Point.
"Combined with indicators suggesting activity beyond Konni's historically South Korean–centric footprint, this operation illustrates how a mature threat actor can maintain stable intrusion workflows while adapting both its targeting and tooling," read the post.
As always, anyone receiving unsolicited emails asking them to click on attached or embedded documents, no matter how legitimate those documents seem, should approach them suspiciously. To help organizations recognize specific signs of Konni's latest attacks on blockchain developers, Check Point included in its blog post a list of indicators of compromise (IoCs), including artifacts related to hashes, scripts, executables, and domains and IPs.
Elizabeth Montalbano, Contributing Writer
Elizabeth Montalbano is a freelance writer, journalist, and therapeutic writing mentor with more than 25 years of professional experience. Her areas of expertise include technology, business, and culture. Elizabeth previously lived and worked as a full-time journalist in Phoenix, San Francisco, and New York City; she currently resides in a village on the southwest coast of Portugal. In her free time, she enjoys surfing, hiking with her dogs, traveling, playing music, yoga, and cooking.
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As if continuing declines in the bitcoin price weren't enough, shares of bitcoin miners who have shifted their business plan to focus on AI infrastructure were mostly sharply lower Monday following Nvidia's $2 billion investment in CoreWeave.
While the investment underscores growing demand for high-performance computing as AI applications expand, it also highlights the challenges for independent miners trying to reposition themselves as infrastructure providers in the space.
Cipher Mining (CIFR), CleanSpark (CLSK), IREN (IREN), and TeraWulf (WULF) were among names 5%-9% lower following the news.
The drop reflects investor concern that CoreWeave's growing lead in the AI infrastructure market could limit the upside for other players.
“The declines across the AI and HPC segment tied to bitcoin miners today signal a commitment between NVIDIA and CoreWeave, with GPU allocation increasingly prioritized toward that partnership,” said James Van Straten, senior bitcoin analyst at CoinDesk. “This could potentially diminish funding prospects for independent miners seeking to pivot into AI infrastructure. The $2 billion capital injection is set to materially expand AI compute capacity for CoreWeave, which would intensify competition and squeeze both margins and market share for smaller players."
Van Straten also noted that CoreWeave's $53 billion market cap is already half the peak valuation of the entire bitcoin-AI mining sector in October.
"As with any maturing industry, consolidation now appears increasingly inevitable,” he said.In addition, Matthew Sigel, head of digital assets at VanEck says CLSK fell about 9% as markets priced in perceived outage risk tied to its Tennessee exposure after state level power headlines, despite its sites being in grid green zones. The drop was compounded by a proxy filing that quantified a roughly $45 million CEO pay package for 2025, raising governance concerns as the firm pivots toward AI, according to Sigel.
The only name showing a sizable gain on Monday is Core Scientific (CORZ). Although CoreWeave tried and failed to acquire CORZ in 2025, the two still continue to have a multi-year data center deal. Shares are higher by just shy of 2% in late-morning trade.
Also outperforming is Hut 8 (HUT), another miner that has diversified into AI hosting and high-performance computing. Along with Core Scientific, HUT also offers infrastructure tailored to large-scale AI applications, giving it a competitive edge as demand for compute surges. HUT shares are higher by 0.2%.
The shift toward AI isn't new. Bitcoin miners, once singularly focused on validating blockchain transactions, have been repurposing their data centers for more profitable workloads, particularly as mining rewards shrink and power costs rise.
Nvidia's latest move, however, suggests those resources may increasingly flow to larger, more tightly integrated players like CoreWeave, forcing smaller firms to adapt or consolidate.
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Disclosure & Polices: CoinDesk is an award-winning media outlet that covers the cryptocurrency industry. Its journalists abide by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk has adopted a set of principles aimed at ensuring the integrity, editorial independence and freedom from bias of its publications. CoinDesk is part of Bullish (NYSE:BLSH), an institutionally focused global digital asset platform that provides market infrastructure and information services. Bullish owns and invests in digital asset businesses and digital assets and CoinDesk employees, including journalists, may receive Bullish equity-based compensation.
A report indicates that alleged opportunities to become rich overnight are proliferating in WhatsApp groups where the Latino community predominates
One of the most popular scams in WhatsApp groups among the Latino community in the United States is the one that promises to make you rich overnight with cryptocurrencies and other investments, according to the third installment of the report WhatsApp weaponized: how scammers target U.S. latinos through public groups by the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas (DDIA) published this week. The first part of the study focuses on unrealistic discounts, giveaways and fake stores; the second part focuses on the use of immigration status as bait.
“The illusion of affordable wealth is the lure used to drain the economic resources of potential targets,” the report highlights, adding that the information gathered reveals a worrying ecosystem in which unregulated investment platforms, cryptocurrency scams, and currency trading schemes proliferate unchecked. “The patterns uncovered here should sound alarms not only for Latino communities but also for U.S. regulators, law enforcement agencies, and financial institutions.”
According to DDIA, more than 3,000 unique messages were analyzed with the help of Palver—a technology company that specializes in social trend analysis—and found that these are marked within WhatsApp with the caption “frequently forwarded,” a warning sign to be cautious. The Institute estimates that these fraudulent messages may have reached more than 192,000 users in 262 groups. “It's an issue that deserves more attention.”
The messages analyzed show that criminals pose as investors, mentors, or coaches who invite Latinos to join an exclusive group of “entrepreneurs” and earn extremely high profits. “How to earn money with your cell phone without leaving home,” says the content, highlighting the promise of a 1,000% return with a suspiciously low initial investment.
The advertisement for automated financial algorithms that promise unrealistic daily returns is one of the most prevalent tactics, according to the study. “Put your money to work for you. No experience necessary. Automatic profits in your wallet,” the messages say. In these cases, criminals request deposits in cryptocurrencies to avoid banking regulations. The digital currency USDT is the most requested for these scams (it is a cryptocurrency designed to maintain a stable value, pegged 1:1 to the U.S. dollar).
Some offers feature a “24-hour plan,” encouraging people to make small investments in USDT with the guarantee of exponential growth in a day. For example, “invest 50 USDT and earn 750 USDT.” In addition, scammers use fake testimonials to gain credibility. The DDIA also identified plans with 150% returns in 24 hours with a minimum 5,000 USDT deposit; and 200% returns in 48 hours with a 50,000 USDT deposit.
The Institute also found financial service “offers” promising loans ranging from $2,000 to $1 million. These are classic lures for what the report calls advance fee frauds: they convince the victim to pay a sum of money to unlock the loan, which never materializes, or which has high and hidden interest rates.
Financial fraud also relies on recruiting new members. “Join our Loom of Abundance. Gift and you will receive multiplied by eight.” DDIA investigators believe that these groups enable Ponzi schemes to go viral: a fraud that pays existing investors with funds raised from new investors.
Some potential scammers use legitimate names of financial institutions and offer personal assistance in opening a bank account, likely with the goal of obtaining sensitive personal information and identity documents from individuals. This investigation also found alleged online gambling promotions: some promise to “double your money” through a limited-time offer.
In recent years, cryptocurrencies have taken on significant importance in the financial industry. So much so that they have reached the highest circles of power. According to Reuters, the Trump family, for example, earned some $800 million during the first half of 2025 thanks to World Liberty Financial, a company founded in 2024 by members of the family.
In light of some irregularities, there is currently an open war between the crypto industry and big banks in the United States. On Thursday, January 15, the Senate Banking Committee was scheduled to vote on the Clarity Act, a legislation that defines the rules of the digital asset market in the country, but on the eve of the debate, lawmakers backed down. Division among Republicans and doubts among some Democrats have stalled the bill passed by the House of Representatives in July 2025.
In contrast, the Genius Act is U.S. President Donald Trump's big promise to leave skepticism about digital currencies behind. The regulation seeks to regulate stablecoins, cryptocurrencies that are linked to an external asset such as the dollar, the euro, or gold to maintain a stable value.
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Researchers from Chiba University have developed a lightweight peer-selection algorithm that significantly reduces data propagation delays without increasing resource usage on internet of things (IoT) devices.
The Japanese university's development team believe that the vision of a fully connected world is rapidly becoming a reality through IoT, including everything from small sensors to autonomous vehicles and industrial equipment.
And to ensure this data is secure and not tampered with, engineers are increasingly turning to blockchain as a promising solution being a decentralised, trustworthy means of communication and specifically a promising solution for secure data sharing in IoT networks. Blockchain systems are seen as a promising solution to the growing complexity of IoT networks that continue to grow in size, but often suffer from high latency that limits time-sensitive applications, with existing blockchain systems can be too slow for the split-second decisions required in real-world IoT environments.
The primary cause of this sluggishness was not the blockchain protocol itself, according to the university researchers, but the disorganised way the nodes within peer-to-peer networks communicate. They also noted that previous research has ignored how the overarching shape of these connections – referred to as the ‘network topology' – affects speed in IoT-blockchain systems.
To address this knowledge gap, a research team led by Kien Nguyen, associate professor at the Institute for Advanced Academic Research/Graduate School of Informatics at Chiba University in Japan, investigated how to streamline operations in IoT-blockchain networks. Their study, published in the journal IEEE transactions on network and service management, investigated how the structure of peer-to-peer blockchain networks affects IoT-blockchain performance, examining the impact of different network topologies on performance and introducing a new method to keep data moving efficiently.
“We aimed to bridge the gap between theoretical design and practical deployment of IoT-blockchain systems by identifying the fundamental causes of their high latency and proposing a decentralised solution that is both simple and effective,” said Nguyen.
To understand the root cause of the delays, the researchers implemented a method to generate different network topologies and connect simulated blockchain clients. After analysing various representative cases, they showed that the decentralised nature of IoT networks often leads to redundant data transmission.
Specifically, they found that the current protocols for sharing “transactions” – that is, the individual data entries – and “blocks” – the larger bundles of verified records – can cause an exponential increase in data copies. The researchers said this results in network congestion and queuing delays, particularly when nodes are connected in a way that creates too many overlapping paths.
In response to this problem, the researchers developed Dual Perigee, what the team called a “lightweight” and decentralised algorithm that allows each node to intelligently choose its preferred “neighbours” in the network. Instead of sticking with a series of random connections, a node using Dual Perigee assigns scores to its peers based on how quickly they deliver both individual transactions and full blocks. If a neighbour is consistently slow, the node automatically disconnects and tries new peers.
After testing in a simulated 50-node IoT environment, the Dual Perigee algorithm reduced block-related delays by 48.54% compared to the standard approach used in the widely known Ethereum blockchain. It was also said to have outperformed state-of-the-art methods, such as the original Perigee algorithm, by over 23%. The researchers said they achieved these gains without adding extra computational strain to the IoT devices themselves, as the algorithm relies on “passive” measurements of data that the devices were already receiving and requires only minimal calculations.
The key intended outcome is that the entire network self-organises into a high-speed configuration without needing a central controller. The researchers firmly believe that work has significant implications across many technological fields. By minimising the time it takes for a blockchain to confirm and share data, the system thus becomes responsive enough for time-sensitive tasks.
“The proposed decentralised latency-aware peer-selection mechanism can serve as a foundation for future blockchain platforms that support real-time, mission-critical IoT services, ultimately enabling more secure, responsive and trustworthy digital infrastructures,” added Nguyen. “Our approach can be applied to emerging IoT-based services that require fast and reliable data sharing, such as smart cities, smart homes, industrial monitoring, healthcare systems and supply-chain tracking.”
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If Congress fails to pass market structure legislation this year, the U.S. crypto market would not revert to the enforcement-heavy environment of 2022 and 2023, but it would remain structurally constrained at a moment when global adoption and institutional interest are accelerating, Wall Street broker Benchmark said.
"The absence of legislation would cause a structural risk premium to persist across much of the digital asset ecosystem," wrote analyst Mark Palmer in the Monday report, adding that this would cap valuation expansion for U.S.-exposed platforms.
Palmer said failure to pass legislation would delay, not derail, crypto's maturation, leaving the U.S. market operating below its potential as investors favor bitcoin-centric exposure, strong balance sheets and cash-flowing infrastructure over regulatory-sensitive segments such as exchanges, decentralized finance (DeFi) and altcoins.
The bill is intended to define U.S. crypto market structure by defining how digital assets might be classified as commodities or securities and clarifying Securities and Exchange (SEC) and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) oversight. While House passage last year shifted the debate toward details like stablecoin yield and DeFi interfaces, Senate negotiations have been slower and more contentious, raising the risk that final approval slips into next year.
Palmer said markets are already pricing in that timing risk. Without a market structure bill, exchanges would face continued listing uncertainty, higher compliance costs and limits on expanding into higher-margin products, while stablecoin monetization could be delayed by unresolved rules around yield and distribution.
Bitcoin BTC$87,948.56 and bitcoin-focused treasury companies would be comparatively insulated, Palmer said, given the crypto's established commodity status, with miners and energy-backed infrastructure also less exposed.
DeFi and smart-contract platforms remain the most vulnerable, as regulatory ambiguity continues to constrain U.S. participation, while custody and compliance providers would hold relatively defensive positions, the report added.
Despite delays, Palmer still views passage of a crypto market structure bill as more likely than not, even if diluted, arguing that any version of the legislation would reduce regulatory risk and unlock broader institutional participation.
Read more: Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong says company opposed crypto bill to protect consumers
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Crypto exchange WhiteBIT flagged by Russia as 'undesirable' over support for Ukraine military
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Disclosure & Polices: CoinDesk is an award-winning media outlet that covers the cryptocurrency industry. Its journalists abide by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk has adopted a set of principles aimed at ensuring the integrity, editorial independence and freedom from bias of its publications. CoinDesk is part of Bullish (NYSE:BLSH), an institutionally focused global digital asset platform that provides market infrastructure and information services. Bullish owns and invests in digital asset businesses and digital assets and CoinDesk employees, including journalists, may receive Bullish equity-based compensation.
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Nigel Farage's cryptocurrency partner is tied to Trump-supporting tech firms and senior Conservative figures, reports Nafeez Ahmed
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When Reform UK announced it would accept cryptocurrency donations through a payment processor called Radom, the decision was presented by the party as a breakthrough in the modernisation of political fundraising. But a Byline Times investigation reveals that Radom's origins lie deep within the same Silicon Valley networks that have bankrolled and built the technological infrastructure for President Donald Trump's political movement in the United States.
The company's leadership emerged from corporations and venture capital firms deeply connected to some of Trump's most prominent tech-world supporters. They include Peter Thiel, the billionaire who became MAGA's chief evangelist in Silicon Valley with over a dozen allies in Trump's second administration, and Larry Ellison, Oracle's controlling shareholder described by a Trump advisor as a “shadow president” behind Trump himself. Byline Times can also confirm that Amazon, a major pro-Trump donor controlled by Jeff Bezos, provided seed-funding to Radom.
Radom had already exerted its influence in the UK Parliament years before Farage's announcement, through an All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) whose secretariat was run by an organisation advertising close relationships with pro-Trump tech giants including Oracle, Google and Microsoft.
Byline Times can reveal that the APPG's secretariat had not only received funding from Oracle, but at the time was dominated by Conservative Party politicians – including current Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch.
Radom's founder and chief executive, Christopher Wilson, cut his teeth as a software engineer at Oracle, the technology giant controlled by Larry Ellison. Wilson worked at Oracle's Greater Dublin office from 2015 to 2017.
Oracle is not merely another Silicon Valley firm. Under Ellison's stewardship, it has become synonymous with a particular strain of pro-Trump, anti-regulatory conservatism rare among major tech companies.
Ellison has hosted fundraisers for Trump, donated substantial sums to Republican Party causes, and positioned himself as one of the President's most prominent backers. A decade ago, senior Oracle executives were hobnobbing with people in Trump's orbit shortly before the 2016 election. Oracle CEO Safra Catz and chief lobbyist Ken Glueck went on to join the Trump administration's transition teams.
Wilson's tenure at Oracle does not necessarily mean he shares Ellison's politics. But it situates Radom's technical leadership within a corporate environment closely entangled with Trump-aligned networks and narratives throughout the MAGA era.
The Reform UK leader received payment from David Bailey, who collaborated with the convicted fraudster behind the Trump-Russia influence scandal
The Trump network connections deepen when examining Radom's other co-founder. Mariel Yonnadam, the company's former chief technology officer from 2022 until 2025, previously worked as a front-end engineer from 2018 to 2019 at Faire, a San Francisco-based marketplace that has become one of Silicon Valley's most highly valued ‘unicorn' start-ups.
Faire's meteoric rise was powered by a roster of venture capital investors that reads like a who's who of Trump-aligned tech finance. Among the most significant are Founders Fund, co-founded by Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention, joined Trump's presidential transition team, and has since incubated numerous hard-right political projects whilst providing intellectual scaffolding for tech nationalism. Another is Sequoia Capital, which in recent years has become increasingly associated with powerful Trump-supporting partners including Douglas Leone, a major Trump campaign donor, and Shaun Maguire, who has gained national prominence for aggressive pro-Trump advocacy.
Yonnadam went on to work as a software engineer for Amazon Web Services (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon founded by Jeff Bezos, from 2019 to 2021. Amazon donated $1 million in cash for Trump's inaugural fund in December 2024, and by August 2025 gave the Trump administration a $1 billion coupon to use their services for the federal government's digital transformation and artificial intelligence capacity.
That year, Radom received seed-funding directly from Amazon through the AWS Activate programme, which provides cloud computing credits to start-ups. The first tranche of at least $30,000 was received through the programme's exclusive ‘Portfolio tier', facilitated by its venture capital backer Tykhe Block Ventures. The Portfolio tier places Radom within a broader ecosystem that includes major Silicon Valley investors – AWS Activate providers listed alongside Tykhe Block include Andreessen Horowitz and NVIDIA, both of which donated to Donald Trump.
This support from Amazon, one of the world's largest technology companies, provided Radom with subsidised cloud infrastructure during its critical growth phase.
Far-right activists were seen stabbing dinghies and releasing dogs to intimidate migrants and aid workers
Radom's presence in British politics predates its partnership with Reform UK by more than a year. In 2022, Wilson became an advisor to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Blockchain.
Though APPGs have no formal legislative power, they give sponsoring companies and organisations significant influence and access. They allow private actors to shape MPs' understanding of emerging sectors, often with minimal transparency about funding or commercial interests.
The Blockchain APPG's secretariat was run by the Big Innovation Centre, a private think tank that publicly advertises an elite client and partner portfolio including Oracle – Wilson's former employer – alongside other American Big Tech giants Google and Microsoft (both of which also donated $1 million each to Trump's inauguration committee).
The centre does not publish descriptions of what these relationships entail, and did not respond to requests for information about its work. But it claims proximity to some of the world's most powerful technology companies.
In 2019, the APPG register confirms, the Big Innovation Centre received a sum of £84,001-85,500 from a consortium of companies to act as the APPG on Blockchain's group secretariat – one of the companies was Oracle. During this period, the APPG's parliamentary membership was dominated by Conservative politicians, who included current Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch as the group's Treasurer, as well as then MP Damien Moore, Lord James Bridges of Headley (former Brexit Minister under Theresa May), Lord Chris Holmes of Richmond, and the late MP David Warburton.Radom's CEO Chris Wilson would join as an advisor three years later. By then, the Conservatives in the group were then MP Stephen Metcalf and Lord Lindesay-Bethune. The APPG appears to have been wound up in 2024.
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Major technology companies, via policy intermediaries like the Big Innovation Centre, enjoyed access and influence onw questions of blockchain, digital assets and regulation – access that helped shape the environment in which crypto firms could establish legitimacy.
Wilson's advisory position within this framework gave Radom credibility at a time when the cryptocurrency sector was struggling to establish itself in mainstream policymaking circles, along with direct access to MPs and peers engaging with blockchain regulation.
When Nigel Farage chose Radom as Reform UK's crypto gateway, he connected his party to a firm whose leadership link directly back to some of the most politically consequential Silicon Valley firms backing Trump's second term.
Crypto donations are not merely a technical innovation in political fundraising. They are also part of the structure of a political movement with deep roots in American right-wing networks – networks now extending their influence across the Atlantic.
Byline Times has previously exposed the foreign interests seemingly tied up with Reform UK's crypto push, including the fact that the party's biggest £9 million donor profits from ties to a pro-Kremlin platform that hosts a Russian intelligence-backed influence operation; and that Nigel Farage himself was paid by a Trump crypto advisor who collaborated with Trump's former campaign chair Paul Manafort, the convicted fraudster behind the Trump-Russia influence scandal. Manafort played a key role in crafting the American President's entire crypto agenda, which Farage is now exporting to Britain.
The question facing British politics is not whether Radom or its founders hold particular political views. It is whether our regulatory and parliamentary systems are sufficiently transparent to scrutinise the activities and influence of foreign-aligned technology companies handed private access to our political institutions.
Radom, Reform UK, and the Big Innovation Centre did not respond to requests for comment.
Byline Times is brought to you by a dedicated team of journalists and contributors – producing independent, fearless, investigative and thought-provoking journalism not found in the established media. We are regulated by Impress.
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Somewhere between the third espresso, Taylor Swift, and my phone hitting a single digit battery, it hit me. Davos 2026 was not about predictions anymore. It was about things that are impacting our future. JPMorgan is live on Ethereum, a third of Gen Z wants an AI boss, and Quantum risk for blockchains!
The World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos has always been where global anxiety becomes a catalyst. This year, technology dominated but broadened to impacting geopolitics and country competition.
So what does any of this have to do with Taylor Swift? When my Gen Z daugther picked me up from the airport and I tried to explain what I learned, she cut me off two sentences in. “Boring.” So I translated to her language and her fandom of Taylor Swift.
Here are ten moments that mattered.
Taylor re-recorded her albums to her own masters. JPMorgan just did the same thing with money.
The world's largest bank is now officially on Ethereum. JPMorgan's first real world asset product, the Onchain Net Yield Fund (MONY), is powered by JPM Kinexys. This is not a pilot or a proof of concept. It is a live, institutional blockchain infrastructure from the most traditional of traditional finance players.
Taylor writes her best songs after breakups. Gen Z is writing theirs about human bosses.
Ana Kreacic, COO of the Oliver Wyman Forum, delivered her annual Davos report. Oliver Wyman's survey of 300,000 voices revealed a striking finding: one third (37%) of Gen Z respondents said they would prefer an AI manager over a human one.
Their reasons?
Consistency, transparency, and fairness. This generation is not rejecting leadership. They are rejecting unpredictability. In my discussions with Dr Efi Pylarinour, Global Fintech Thought Leader, she said that “they are not longing for a robot CEO. They are longing for the consistency, transparency, and fairness they rarely see in humans.”
Taylor moved from country to pop. AI just moved from Tech to Geopolitics.
AI crossed a threshold at Davos this year. It is no longer simply a technology topic. It is an economic and geopolitical one, with trust and regulation dominating the tone across sessions and side conversations alike.
Elon Musk, in his first ever Davos appearance, predicted that AI could surpass any individual human by the end of this year. By 2030, AI will be smarter than all of humanity combined.
He painted a vision of "abundance for all" where robots outnumber people and the global economy explodes.
But while Musk was outlining this utopia, Autodesk was laying off 1,000 employees, betting on AI to automate their jobs. The world's leaders are grappling with this very tension, pushing for "trusted AI."
Taylor hides Easter eggs in every album. The quantum threat to crypto has been hiding in plain sight too.
During Davos week, the Citi Institute released a deep dive on the quantum threat to blockchain, revealing that risk is unevenly distributed: Bitcoin has roughly 25 percent of coins exposed while Ethereum and Solana face far higher vulnerability over 65 percent.at Accenture.
Ronit Ghose, Managing Director, Citi Institute, told me that “Citi Institute believes the starting gun has been fired on a trillion dollar security race now underway for banks and blockchains to move to post quantum cryptography”
Taylor drops vault tracks to release when the world is ready. The fix for quantum has been sitting in the vault too.
The standards exist. NIST has published them. Regulators are pushing timelines. The problem is execution. Quantum readiness requires mapping exposure, prioritizing critical systems, enabling crypto agility, and executing multiyear migrations. This may be the largest cryptographic upgrade in human history, potentially exceeding the cost and complexity of Y2K.
In chatting with Steve Suarez, CEO of HorizonX and a contributor to the report, he noted that "as the field matures, it's becoming increasingly clear that progress will depend on how effectively the ecosystem bridges advances in hardware with practical, deployable applications. This will be the largest software upgrade in history with over 20 billion hardware devices that will need to be upgraded. 'The takeaway: social consensus and coordinated upgrades will determine which ecosystems survive the quantum transition intact.
The Accenture panel on Quantum was one of the best I saw. “The quantum conversation is moving from cryptographic circles to boardrooms. Companies need to act the same with Quantum as they do with AI,” Tom Patterson, Managing Partner at Accenture, told me. “In AI they don't just try it out, they just do it. Quantum needs the same mindset.:
The Eras Tour features every version of Taylor performing together. Multi agent AI works the same way.
Cognizant showcased their open source multi agent platform with a live demo. Babak Hodjat, their Chief AI Officer explained to me “that the system is itself a multi agent system that designs and builds other multi agent systems through dialogue.
The future Hodjat envisions? Agents that can merge responsibilities, split when overloaded, and form new connections spontaneously. The open source repo is live here.
Everyone talks about concerts, but the real money is made at the merch table. AI works the same way.
One of the most interesting things I heard was the HFS research report. The report indicates that for every $2 spent on AI initiatives, enterprises should invest roughly $2.50 on data modernization, governance, and management.
In addition, the report laid out the ideal length of time that an ideal Chief AI Officer should remain in office. The three year lifespan of the Chief AI Officer discusses the stabilize, focus, embed, and dissolve phases.
Leading AI companies like OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Anthropic are each spending roughly a billion dollars a year on human provided training data alone. The mantra has shifted from more data to better data, and that means humans in the loop at scale.
Taylor went from opening act to headlining statuiums. Crypto just did the same at Davos.
CZ, Binance co-founder and former CEO, and Yat Siu, co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands, both spoke at official WEF sessions, a sign of just how far crypto has come from the sidelines.
CZ predicted a Bitcoin supercycle in 2026 and revealed he is advising roughly a dozen governments on asset tokenization. He described a future where AI agents transact natively in crypto, and where traditional payment rails like Visa and Mastercard sit on top while stablecoins settle behind the scenes.
Yat Siu was equally bullish, calling stablecoins a pillar of future financial growth and predicting the Clarity Act will pass this year, triggering a wave of US tokenization.
Taylor made music videos as important as the songs. World models are doing the same for AI, learning from video instead of just text.
The concept is straightforward: instead of predicting the next word like ChatGPT and its peers, world models predict what happens next in the physical world. They learn from video, simulation, and spatial data to build internal representations of how objects move and interact over time.
Google, Nvidia, and Fei Fei Li's World Labs are all investing heavily. For leaders building on AI infrastructure, the question is whether the next breakthrough comes from scaling language models or from teaching machines to perceive physical reality.
Swifties trade friendship bracelets to show they belong to something bigger. Davos just did the same thing for Web3.
At the Davos Web3 House, leaders gathered to sign the Web3 Declaration, celebrating the progress made across the ecosystem over the past year. It was a moment of reflection in a week defined by forward momentum. Ajeet Khurana, the founder of the Web Davos House, told me that “web3 has made such progress in 2026 that we wanted to drive more value around crypto, DePin, stablecoins, and more into the fabric of global companies.”
Davos 2026 made one thing clear: the lines between AI, blockchain, quantum, and geopolitics are dissolving. The question is no longer whether these technologies will converge. It is whether organizations can move fast enough to keep up. Taylor Swift figured out how to stay ahead of every era. Can you?
Build it and they will come—or so goes the old saying. In reality, if you build a blockchain-based social media network, then almost no one will come. The crypto world got another reminder of this last week when Farcaster, which raised a $150 Series A round in 2024, abruptly called it quits.
If you're unfamiliar, Farcaster was co-founded by early Coinbase employee Dan Romero and let users share various content via a Twitter-like timeline. The project had the lofty goal of breaking the data monopolies of platforms like Facebook by offering a decentralized alternative—one where users kept control of their data and identity.
Despite a $1 billion valuation and some influential backers, Farcaster never built a meaningful audience beyond an army of bots and a small clique of VC cheerleaders. Eventually, the founders acknowledged the obvious (that no one used Farcaster) and threw in the towel, but with a face-saving announcement that they had arranged a “sale” of the protocol to a third party. To his credit, Romero also announced he would return the $180 million he had raised to Farcaster's investors.
So what happened? Some on X have pointed to the management team as the primary reason for Farcaster's failure, a claim that may or may not be justified. What is clear is that there has been little appetite in the market for a crypto social network. This is apparent from the failure of previous efforts, including the scammy BitClout network, and the recent decision by Coinbase's Base to focus on financial applications over social ones.
All of this reflects how people may love the idea of using a blockchain for data sovereignty but, in reality, they are going to seek out their social media fix on X or TikTok or Reddit. That's because those platforms are humming with millions of users while providing an interface that is far sleeker than what a crypto startup can conjure up.
There may also be a bigger problem for those trying to build social and other applications on blockchain. Namely, the technology may simply not be cut out to do this—and that crypto should stick to what it's always been good at, which is finance.
Over 17 years or so, crypto has come up with three killer apps that have found massive product market fit: Bitcoin, stablecoins, and DeFi. All three are squarely in the realm of finance. Meanwhile, the idea of using blockchain to transform other industries like media or supply chains seems as far-off as ever—though there is renewed buzz about using decentralized technology to expand privacy.
As for Farcaster itself, it may stand as the high water mark for an earlier era of crypto that was defined by a popular book about data ownership called Read Write Own. As one observer noted on X: “With Farcaster losing its founders, Chris Dixon's Read Write Own era is over. Crypto is for Internet Capital Markets. Period.”
Jeff John Roberts jeff.roberts@fortune.com@jeffjohnroberts
BitGo became the first crypto IPO of 2026 with the longtime custody and infrastructure firm enjoying a podcast pop on its first day before sliding below its listing price by end of week. (Fortune)
An 8-figure sponsorship deal has created the MoonPay X Games, giving a new name to the long-running extreme sports competition, and a new format that will provide more pay to athletes under a team-based system. (Decrypt)
The fate of the Clarity Act, which would provide regulatory structure for crypto, remains uncertain amid a squabble over rules for stablecoin yields. The bill is stalled in Senate sub-committees, but one insider thinks it has momentum. (Fortune)
Binance is setting up shop in Greece, where it filed for a pan-European MiCA license and set up a holding company. The license will become mandatory for all crypto companies in the EU as of July 1. (Fortune)
Crypto video game tie-ups have largely proved a flop, but a startup called ZBD with ties to a Bitcoin OG believes it's found a model. It raised $40 million from Blockstream Capital to focus on crypto-based payments for gameplay. (Fortune)
Even at a Davos gathering heavy on crypto content, CZ stood out for a televised interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin where he described in intimate detail the strip search process during his prison stay.
In a final sign the metaverse era is done for good, Mark Zuckerberg turned the lights off on the remains of a project that once seemed so important that he renamed his company for it.
Jeff John Roberts is the Finance and Crypto editor at Fortune, overseeing coverage of the blockchain and how technology is changing finance.
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DeFi Technologies (Nasdaq: DEFT) subsidiary Valour has received approval from the UK Financial Conduct Authority and the London Stock Exchange to offer select yield-bearing crypto ETPs to UK retail investors, effective January 26, 2026. Approved UK base prospectuses cover 1Valour Bitcoin Physical Staking (ISIN GB00BRBV3124) and 1Valour Ethereum Physical Staking (ISIN GB00BRBMZ190). These exchange-listed ETPs provide physically-backed BTC and ETH exposure with a staking yield component reflected in each ETP's NAV, and will be accessible through traditional UK brokerage and investment platforms via the LSE.
This expands prior professional-investor LSE launches to UK retail, aiming to broaden regulated retail access to digital asset exposure through familiar exchange-listed instruments.
DEFT is down 6.23% while key peers show mixed moves: HIVE up 4.89%, AMRK up 2.17%, OPY down 2.25%, BTBT down 0.94%, FUFU flat. This points to a stock-specific reaction rather than a broad sector move.
Same-tag crypto,offering news linked to capital raises has previously seen negative price reactions, suggesting sensitivity to financing-related announcements.
Over recent crypto,offering events, DeFi Technologies focused on sizable registered direct offerings. On Sep 25, 2025, it announced pricing of an oversubscribed US$100 million deal with shares and warrants, followed by closing the same US$100 million offering on Sep 26, 2025. Both updates centered on funding growth and ETP expansion and were met with negative single-day share reactions.
Past crypto,offering news for DEFT (2 events) averaged a 9.55% move with negative reactions to capital-raising updates, framing today's UK-focused product approval in a different risk context.
Historical same-tag events emphasized raising US$100 million via registered direct offerings, whereas the current update focuses on expanding distribution of existing crypto ETPs to UK retail investors.
This announcement highlights UK FCA and LSE approvals that enabled Valour to begin offering Bitcoin and Ethereum staking ETPs to UK retail investors on January 26, 2026. It extends prior professional-only LSE access into the retail channel, adding a yield component via staking within regulated exchange-listed products. Investors may watch how assets, trading activity, and future geographic expansions evolve alongside these new UK listings.
AI-generated analysis. Not financial advice.
TORONTO, Jan. 26, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- (the “Company” or “DeFi Technologies”) (Nasdaq: DEFT) (CBOE CA: DEFI) (GR: R9B), a financial technology company bridging the gap between traditional capital markets and decentralized finance (“DeFi”), is pleased to announce that its subsidiary, Valour Inc., and Valour Digital Securities Limited (together, "Valour"), a leading issuer of exchange traded products ("ETPs") has received UK regulatory approval and has begun offering select Valour ETPs to UK retail investors through the London Stock Exchange (“LSE”) starting January 26, 2026.
The UK Financial Conduct Authority (“FCA”) has approved Valour's UK base prospectuses for the following products, supporting expanded access for UK retail investors to regulated digital asset exposure through traditional brokerage and investment platforms:
Approved Products (UK Base Prospectuses)
Building on Valour's prior LSE launches for professional investors, retail access now expands in the UK. Following the launch of Valour's asset-backed Ethereum Physical Staking ETP for professional investors and the launch of the world's first physically-backed Bitcoin Staking ETP, Valour is pleased to offer these products to UK retail investors.
“This is a major milestone for Valour and DeFi Technologies as we continue expanding access to regulated digital asset investment products,” said Johan Wattenström, CEO and Chairman of DeFi Technologies. “The UK is one of the world's most important financial markets, and these approvals broaden our ability to serve UK retail investors with transparent, exchange-listed products that provide straightforward exposure to the evolving digital asset economy.”
Valour's 1Valour Bitcoin Physical Staking ETP is designed to provide regulated access to Bitcoin with a staking yield component that is reflected in the ETP's net asset value (“NAV”). Valour's Ethereum Physical Staking ETP similarly provides physically-backed exposure to Ethereum with staking reward participation through an exchange-listed instrument.
About DeFi TechnologiesDeFi Technologies Inc. (Nasdaq: DEFT) (CBOE CA: DEFI) (GR: R9B) is a financial technology company bridging the gap between traditional capital markets and decentralized finance (“DeFi”). As the first Nasdaq-listed digital asset manager of its kind, DeFi Technologies offers equity investors diversified exposure to the broader decentralized economy through its integrated and scalable business model. This includes Valour, which offers access to over one hundred of the world's most innovative digital assets via regulated ETPs; Stillman Digital, a digital asset prime brokerage focused on institutional-grade execution and custody; Reflexivity Research, which provides leading research into the digital asset space; Neuronomics, which develops quantitative trading strategies and infrastructure; and DeFi Alpha, the company's internal arbitrage and trading business line. With deep expertise across capital markets and emerging technologies, DeFi Technologies is building the institutional gateway to the future of finance. Follow DeFi Technologies on LinkedIn and X/Twitter, and for more details, visit https://defi.tech/
DeFi Technologies Subsidiaries
About ValourValour Inc. and Valour Digital Securities Limited (together, “Valour”) issues exchange traded products (“ETPs”) that enable retail and institutional investors to access digital assets in a simple and secure way via their traditional bank account. Valour is part of the asset management business line of DeFi Technologies. For more information about Valour, to subscribe, or to receive updates, visit valour.com.
About Reflexivity ResearchReflexivity Research LLC is a leading research firm specializing in the creation of high-quality, in-depth research reports for the bitcoin and digital asset industry, empowering investors with valuable insights. For more information please visit https://www.reflexivityresearch.com/
About Stillman DigitalStillman Digital is a leading digital asset liquidity provider that offers limitless liquidity solutions for businesses, focusing on industry-leading trade execution, settlement, and technology. For more information, please visit https://www.stillmandigital.com
Cautionary note regarding forward-looking information: This press release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. Forward-looking information includes, but is not limited to the the listing of 1Valour Bitcoin Physical Staking, 1Valour Ethereum Physical Staking; the development of the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains; investor confidence in Valour's ETPs; investor interest and confidence in digital assets; the regulatory environment with respect to the growth and adoption of decentralized finance; the pursuit by the Company and its subsidiaries of business opportunities; and the merits or potential returns of any such opportunities. Forward-looking information is subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements of the Company, as the case may be, to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information. Such risks, uncertainties and other factors include, but is not limited the acceptance of Valour ETPs by exchanges; growth and development of decentralised finance and cryptocurrency sector; rules and regulations with respect to decentralised finance and cryptocurrency; general business, economic, competitive, political and social uncertainties. Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking information, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that such information will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. The Company does not undertake to update any forward-looking information, except in accordance with applicable securities laws.
THE CBOE CANADA EXCHANGE DOES NOT ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS RELEASE
For further information, please contact:
Johan WattenströmChief Executive Officerir@defi.tech (323) 537-7681
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Nifty Gateway shuts down amid dwindling NFT market. Credit: Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images.
Key Takeaways
The non-fungible token (NFT) ecosystem is collapsing to new lows amid dim demands and a lack of functionality.
Nifty Gateway, one of the earliest and most recognizable NFT marketplaces, is among the latest casualties.
The platform announced it will shut down on Feb. 23, 2026, effective immediately, entering “withdrawal-only” mode.
Acquired by crypto exchange Gemini in 2019, Nifty Gateway was once a flagship name of the NFT era—now, it's another sign of how far the market has fallen.
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Nifty Gateway's shutdown reflects a broader consolidation across the NFT market.
Large platforms like OpenSea have steadily absorbed market share—accounting for roughly 62% of NFT transactions in 2025—leaving smaller or more specialized marketplaces increasingly exposed.
Reaction across the NFT community has been mixed.
Some see the closure as confirmation that the speculative NFT era is over, arguing the sector must evolve toward real infrastructure and utility to survive.
Others expressed disappointment, but still framed the shutdown as a necessary reset rather than a failure.
Nifty Gateway's exit caps a turbulent year for NFTs.
In 2025, supply surged while demand collapsed, creating a widening gap between what was minted and what actually sold.
Minting accelerated as creators flocked to low-cost blockchains like Solana and newer networks such as Monad and Berachain, where launching collections became cheap and fast.
Yet sales volumes and revenues fell sharply, exposing a market unable to absorb the flood of new assets.
The industry continued shifting away from hype-driven speculation—dominant in 2021 and 2022—toward utility-focused use cases, including gaming, real-world asset tokenization, and AI-generated content.
Still, those efforts failed to offset what many now describe as an extended “NFT winter.”
Market fatigue, regulatory pressure, persistent scams, and growing competition from other crypto sectors like DeFi and memecoins all weighed heavily on the space.
Against that backdrop, Nifty Gateway's exit looks less like an isolated event and more like a symptom of a market still searching for its next act.
The NFT market's 2025 performance pales in comparison to its explosive highs in 2021-2022, when speculation drove unprecedented volumes.
Celebrity endorsements, metaverse hype, and easy money in crypto bull markets fueled the peak.
By 2025, the market had matured—but also contracted.
Total NFT supply ballooned to roughly 1.34 billion tokens, up about 25% year over year, as low-cost minting removed barriers to entry.
At the same time, total sales revenue fell roughly 37% to about $5.63 billion, down from $8.9 billion in 2024.
Average sale prices dropped sharply, often below $100, with the art segment suffering the steepest declines.
While the number of NFT holders grew to around 11.6 million, much of that activity shifted toward gaming NFTs, tokenized real-world assets, and AI-generated collectibles.
Compared to the boom years—when prices often reached hundreds or thousands of dollars, and annual volumes hit tens of billions—the contrast is stark.
By early 2026, sales remain down 70–80% from peak levels, speculation has largely faded, and the market feels smaller but more grounded.
Surviving projects now focus on utility, gaming, culture, and real-world integration rather than quick flips—suggesting NFTs may be settling into a quieter, more sustainable role after years of excess.
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One tip led the police to the house in Axel, but the arrested individuals were eventually released after interrogation.
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Four suspects were arrested by Zeeland police in the Netherlands after the authorities received a tip that they were involved in the theft of 169 NFTs. According to Dutch newspaper Politie [machine translated], the three individuals from Axel and one from the neighboring Terneuzen have been interrogated by detectives but have since been released. Nevertheless, the police action also included the seizure of various data carriers and money, as well as three vehicles and the house itself where the raid was conducted.
The stolen NFTs were estimated to be worth 1.4 million Euros (around $1.65 million), which is indeed a massive amount. However, this is a tiny drop in the Ocean of stolen Bitcoin and other crypto, estimated to be worth $17 billion in 2025 alone. We should note that NFTs are not exactly the same as cryptocurrencies, but they both run on blockchain technology and can even be stored on the same wallets that keep Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the like.
The relative novelty of cryptocurrencies and NFTs means that many people get scammed when using these technologies, especially older people who are often tricked into depositing large amounts of cash into Bitcoin ATMs. But even those who are used to the system can fall victim, either through phishing, social engineering, malware, or seed phrase theft, among others.
The large values tied to NFTs and Bitcoin make them lucrative targets for hackers, with just one well-targeted heist able to net millions of dollars in profit. There was even a true-crime story about a group of hackers who stole 4,100 Bitcoins and lived a high-roller lifestyle for a short time, before everything devolved into assault and kidnapping, eventually attracting the attention of federal agencies.
Since NFTs are tokens and are stored in wallets, the suspected thieves didn't perform a bank vault heist with guns blazing. Instead, it was done behind monitors and keyboards, where they likely targeted individuals using phishing websites, fake wallet apps, or even with compromised browser extensions. It also seems that the Zeeland authorities do not have enough evidence against the four individuals, as they were eventually released after their interrogation. Still, the seized items should hopefully assist the police in their investigation and eventually lead to the arrest and conviction of the real perps.
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Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He's been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he's been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics.
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The North Korean threat actor known as Konni has been observed using PowerShell malware generated using artificial intelligence (AI) tools to target developers and engineering teams in the blockchain sector.
The phishing campaign has targeted Japan, Australia, and India, highlighting the adversary's expansion of the targeting scope beyond South Korea, Russia, Ukraine, and European nations, Check Point Research said in a technical report published last week.
Active since at least 2014, Konni is primarily known for its targeting of organizations and individuals in South Korea. It's also tracked as Earth Imp, Opal Sleet, Osmium, TA406, and Vedalia.
In November 2025, the Genians Security Center (GSC) detailed the hacking group's targeting of Android devices by exploiting Google's asset tracking service, Find Hub, to remotely reset victim devices and erase personal data from them, signaling a new escalation of their tradecraft.
As recently as this month, Konni has been observed distributing spear-phishing emails containing malicious links that are disguised as harmless advertising URLs associated with Google and Naver's advertising platforms to bypass security filters and deliver a remote access trojan codenamed EndRAT.
The campaign has been codenamed Operation Poseidon by the GSC, with the attacks impersonating North Korean human rights organizations and financial institutions in South Korea. The attacks are also characterized by the use of improperly secured WordPress websites to distribute malware and for command-and-control (C2) infrastructure.
The email messages have been found to masquerade as financial notices, such as transaction confirmations or wire transfer requests, to trick recipients into downloading ZIP archives hosted on WordPress sites. The ZIP file comes with a Windows shortcut (LNK) that's designed to execute an AutoIt script disguised as a PDF document. The AutoIt script is a known Konni malware called EndRAT (aka EndClient RAT).
"This attack is analyzed as a case that effectively bypassed email security filtering and user vigilance through a spear-phishing attack vector that exploited the ad click redirection mechanism used within the Google advertising ecosystem," the South Korean security outfit said.
"It was confirmed that the attacker utilized the redirection URL structure of a domain used for legitimate ad click tracking (ad.doubleclick[.]net) to incrementally direct users to external infrastructure where actual malicious files were hosted."
The latest campaign documented by Check Point leverages ZIP files mimicking project requirements-themed documents and hosted on Discord's content delivery network (CDN) to unleash a multi-stage attack chain that performs the following sequence of actions. The exact initial access vector used in the attacks is unknown.
The cybersecurity company said there are indications that the PowerShell backdoor was created with the assistance of an AI tool, citing its modular structure, human-readable documentation, and the presence of source code comments like "# <– your permanent project UUID."
"Instead of focusing on individual end-users, the campaign goal seems to be to establish a foothold in development environments, where compromise can provide broader downstream access across multiple projects and services," Check Point said. "The introduction of AI-assisted tooling suggests an effort to accelerate development and standardize code while continuing to rely on proven delivery methods and social engineering."
The findings coincide with the discovery of multiple North Korea-led campaigns that facilitate remote control and data theft -
According to Finnish cybersecurity company WithSecure, the ERP vendor's software has been the target of similar supply chain compromises twice in the past – in 2017 and again in 2024 – to deploy malware families like HotCroissant and Xctdoor.
While JelusRAT is written in C++ and supports capabilities to retrieve plugins from the C2 server, StarshellRAT is developed in C# and supports command execution, file upload/download, and screenshot capture. GopherRAT, on the other hand, is based on Golang and features the ability to run commands or binaries, exfiltrate files, and enumerate the file system.
"Their targeting and objectives have varied over time; some campaigns have pursued financial gain, while others have focused on stealing information aligned with the regime's priority intelligence needs," WithSecure researcher Mohammad Kazem Hassan Nejad said. "This variability underscores the group's flexibility and its ability to support broader strategic goals as those priorities change over time."
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Entropy founder and CEO Tux Pacific says that, after four years and multiple pivots, the project was unable to find a scalable business model.
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Crypto start-up Entropy is closing down and handing funds back to investors, citing issues with scaling and struggling to find product-market fit.
Entropy founder and CEO Tux Pacific posted to X on Saturday that the crypto automations platform doesn't have a viable path forward after years of operation.
“After four years, several pivots, and two rounds of layoffs, I've decided to wind-up Entropy and return capital to our investors,” Pacific said.
Entropy launched in late 2021 initially as a decentralized self-custody solution, with crypto venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz backing it alongside Coinbase Ventures as part of a $25 million seed funding round in June 2022.
Pacific said that over the second half of 2025, Entropy was developing a crypto automations platform integrated with artificial intelligence, in a similar fashion to mainstream workflow platforms such as Zapier.
Related: How AI crypto trading will make and break human roles
However, Pacific said that “after an initial feedback request revealed that the business model wasn't venture scale, I was left with the choice to find a creative way forward or pivot once more.”
“After four hard years working in crypto, I decided that the best I could do has already been done: it was time to close up shop.”
Entropy's wind-up comes after the a16z-backed decentralized social networking protocol Farcaster said on Thursday it would return $180 million in capital to investors amid a takeover by infrastructure provider Neynar.
Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero quashed rumours that the platform was shutting down via X, noting Neynar would steer the project in a more developer-focused direction, with Farcaster still having strong usage metrics.
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Quite an advantage in today's world.
Here's what you'll learn when reading this story:
The epaulette shark (Hemiscyllium ocellatum), which lives off the coast of northern Australia and New Guinea, is a strange creature. For one, it's the youngest known shark in the world, with genetic evidence suggesting their emergence only nine million years ago. But its true claim to fame is found within its common moniker—this three-foot-long “walking shark” can not only use its thick, muscular fins to explore its coral ecosystem, but it can also traverse above water between coral heads at low tide. Some experts argue that this may suggest that sharks could one day evolve to walk on land.
But a new study, published in the journal Biology Open, makes an even more puzzling discovery about this fascinating shallow-sea creature. Energy is king in the natural world, and a large driver of evolution is developing strategies to reduce energy expenditure by any means necessary. One of the biggest drains of that energy—as any human mother will tell you—is the physical act of reproduction, but even this immensely energy-intensive task has been remarkably streamlined in the epaulette shark.
“Reproduction is the ultimate investment … you are literally building new life from scratch,”Jodie Rummer, the senior author of the study from James Cook University (JCU), said in a press statement. “We expected that when sharks make this complex egg, their energy use would shoot up.”
The assumption is that the reproduction cycle of sharks—along with other chondrichthyan fishes such as rays, skates, and chimaeras—are energy-intensive due to small litter sizes and their long gestation periods. The frilled shark (Chlamydoselachus anguineus), for example, holds the record for the longest vertebrate gestation at 3.5 years. To get more data on the energy requirements for shark reproduction, Rummer and her team recorded metabolic and physiological changes in five epaulette sharks during oviparous (egg-laying) reproduction by tracking oxygen uptake and measuring reproductive hormones. The results were not what the scientists expected.
“There was no uptick in energy use, it was completely flat,” Rummer said in a press statement. “These sharks appear to have adapted their physiology to be able to optimize their energy use. This work challenges the narrative that when things go wrong—such as warming oceans—that reproduction will be the first thing to go.”
This good news expands beyond just epaulette sharks themselves. When animals are under stress, reproduction is often impacted as a means to conserve energy—and there's no greater stressor than climate change. Luckily, the amazing “walking shark” doesn't require an immense energy spike for reproduction, suggesting that the shark could continue exploring Australia's coral reefs even as its waters warm.
“Under environmental stress, many species will choose between survival and reproduction, but the epaulette shark might be able to continue to produce eggs, even under such stressors,” Carolyn Wheeler, the lead author and a recent JCU Ph.D. graduate, said in a press statement. “That's encouraging, because healthy sharks equal healthy reefs.”
With any luck, future descendants of the epaulette shark will survive long enough to walk on an Earth where the dangerous effects of anthropogenic climate change are far in the rearview.
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The tablets were purposefully thrown in a well to obscure what was written on them, but there were still impressions on the wood scholars painstakingly deciphered.
Here's what you'll learn when you read this story:
Roman officials in modern-day Belgium once tossed old wooden frames used for wax writing tablets into a well to make sure nobody could read what was written. Now, a group of scholars has figured out why.
The millimeter-thick layer of wax used for writing is long gone from the wooden frames. But when the Romans used them for writing, the impressions made into the wax left enough pressure on the wooden backing to leave unintended remnants of their messages on the wood itself, messages that experts determined were written in the Roman settlement of Atuatuca Tungrorum, now known as Tongeren, Belgium.
The team published its findings online, showing off their discovery of traces of government documents and offering historical context that was previously unknown. “The tablets not only provide concrete information about religious, judicial, and administrative practices, but they also enhance our understanding of the complex processes of Romanization and Latinization in the northwestern civitates and municipia of the Roman Empire,” the team wrote.
In all, the team investigated 85 different fragment pieces, some of which were found in the 1930s, discarded in a well near the city's forum. These were likely official government documents purposefully throw in into the well to destroy them. Think of it as an ancient paper shredder.
Another group of fragments was discovered in 2013 in a muddy hole. These appeared to have pupils' writing exercises on them. They also featured a draft inscription for a statue of the future Emperor Caracalla, dating 207 C.E.
“The wood, with its natural grain, was completely dried out,” Markus Scholz, a specialist in provincial Roman archaeology and ancient inscriptions who led the team in deciphering the writing, said in a translated statement from Goethe University Frankfurt. “Distinguishing between grooves that formed part of a letter and those caused by cracks, damage, or the drying process itself was extremely challenging.”
About half of the 85 total fragments had preserved identifiable traces of writing. The remnants reveal evidence that high political offices were held in the Roman provinces, including mentions of a senior magistrate known as a decemvir. The remnants also provided evidence of lictores, bodyguards, or attendants of high-ranking officials. The team said these roles were not commonly found in the northern provinces.
The texts also allude to some members living there following service in the Roman military, specifically veterans of the Rhine fleet. Names on the tablets show Celtic, Roman, and Germanic origins, including names not seen in other sources.
Scholz called the deciphering process painstaking. It included paleography, philology, onomastics, wax analysis, wood species identification, and script visualization by multi-light reflectance imaging. Since the wood was designed for continual reuse, there was plenty of overlapping writing, further complicating the deciphering process.
When discovered nearly 100 years ago, scholars thought the wood pieces were planks or boxes. It wasn't until much later that they were identified as wooden frames of Roman wax tablets. Now, messages intended to be lost to time have become legible once more, centuries later. So think about that the next time you're deleting a text or shredding some paperwork.
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The armor belonged to a Tuyuhun king and was only believed to be myth.
Here's what you'll learn when you read this story:
The ancient Chinese legend that Tang dynasty rulers donned gold-plated armor in battle had long been mere myth—until now. Researchers not only discovered a suit of gilded armor in a Tibetan plateau tomb of a Tuyuhun king, but they've now restored the find to digitally recreate what was likely its original look.
Archaeologists first discovered the roughly 1,200-year-old suspected suit of armor in a Qinghai Province tomb in 2018, according to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), but they didn't quite know just what they had discovered. The fragments of armor found within the Xuewei No. 1 Tomb in Dulan Country were first believed to be bronze armor plates, many rectangular with a semicircular lower edge. The fragments were often fragile to the touch, and many pieces were missing due to past looting.
The team then spent years working on the find and, after sifting through missing sections and badly damaged areas of the armor, realized it was actually gold, turning the Tang Dynasty legend into reality.
“We adopted a strategy of disassembling the whole into parts and reassembling the parts into a whole, conducting layered cleaning, extraction, and protection while meticulously cataloging each armor plate,” Guo Zhengchen, a conservationist working on the armor, said during a press conference according to the South China Morning Post.
China's Tang dynasty celebrated its illustrious golden armor in art and poetry. For example a notable work by Tang poet Wang Changling read: “We will not leave the desert till we beat the foe, although in war our golden armor be outworn 100 times,” according to the SCMP.
Confirmed as the tomb of a Tuyuhun king, the armor of gold was likely a precious possession, helping bring to life another Tang dynasty line of poetry: “Like golden scale on water, sunrays strike our coats of mail.” The region was once home to a powerful kingdom on China's western frontier. The tomb site sat along the Silk Road, helping link the Tubo empire and the Tang dynasty to points both east and west.
The project embraced modern technology to bring new life to the legendary armor, using 3D scanning, microscopy technology, as well as virtual and augmented reality to help process the reconstruction. “These technologies have provided solutions to the challenges of artifact degradation, allowing for more accurate restoration, interactive displays, and global accessibility to cultural heritage,” archaeologists previously wrote about the process, according to CASS.
CASS said in a statement that the “approach enabled the scientific restoration of several sets of precious cultural relics that were severely damaged and structurally complex,” including the only physical example of a Tang dynasty golden armor.
As evidenced by the unique coat of armor, the Tuyuhun king seemed to enjoy a little panache—he also had quite a fanciful covering for his horse. The team found a damaged lacquered horse armor—this one with gold adorning the edges—and restored it as well. Additionally found in the tomb was a lacquered tray designed to hold grapes featuring intricate Tang dynasty gold-and-silver inlay designs. All these finds help breathe new life into pieces of Chinese history once thought to only be the stuff of legend.
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Wind and solar power needs to expand rapidly if we are to replace fossil fuels by 2050. Credit: Ke Zhuang/Getty
On 28 October 2025, United Nations secretary-general António Guterres acknowledged that the totemic goal of the Paris climate agreement is going to be missed: “The truth is that we have failed to avoid an overshooting above 1.5 °C in the next few years”1.
Approaching 1.5 °C: how will we know we've reached this crucial warming mark?
Approaching 1.5 °C: how will we know we've reached this crucial warming mark?
Guterres was merely stating the obvious. In 2024, Earth's global mean surface temperature averaged 1.55 °C above pre-industrial levels2, and the average for 2023–25 is 1.48 °C, perilously close to the limit. Keeping to the Paris target now looks impossible by any realistic measure. Yet this moment should not invite despair. Instead, it demands an urgent reframing of how climate progress is measured and mobilized.
The world today looks very different from that in 2015 when the Paris goal was framed. Although emissions are still rising and global actions on climate change are slow, a lot of progress has been made. Clean energy is expanding rapidly and decarbonization, not fossil fuels, is the new ‘business as usual'. In the first three quarters of 2025, growth in clean electricity generation outpaced that in energy demand for the first time, implying that fossil fuels are being displaced (see go.nature.com/3jvqzcb).
We argue that the main focus of climate action in 2026 and beyond should be on accelerating the clean-energy revolution. And the rate at which clean energy displaces fossil fuels in the global economy should become the key measure of climate progress. Here we describe how such progress can be tracked and incentivized using a metric we call the clean-energy shift. Unlike chasing intangible temperature targets, cleaning up the energy sector is a more-focused battle that the world can win.
To move forwards, climate scientists and policymakers must first accept that the Paris 1.5 °C target has outlived its usefulness. Although initially valuable as a unifying focus for international efforts to increase mitigation, continuing to emphasize a failed temperature target might produce more harm than good.
One reason is the difficulty of determining when and whether the world has crossed the line. Forecasts suggest that Earth is likely to exceed the 1.5 °C threshold around 2028, for instance (see go.nature.com/4pf95x6). But in the terminology of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “exceedance” of 1.5 °C refers to the midpoint of a 20-year period at that level3. Confirmation would therefore not come until a decade after the fact.
Environmental treaties are paralysed — here's how we can do better
Environmental treaties are paralysed — here's how we can do better
Such a target, requiring years of expert interpretation to assess, could never have great salience for decision makers. And it challenges public understanding because, by definition, no person experiences global average temperatures. Moving to a higher number when 1.5 °C is crossed, such as 1.6 °C or 1.7 °C, would only make climate target setting seem arbitrary and unrooted in scientific evidence.
More concerningly, the emphasis on keeping Earth's temperature below 1.5 °C might serve to justify risky interventions in the climate system. For example, injecting vast amounts of sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere through ‘solar radiation modification' could be one of the few remaining ways to bring 1.5 °C back into reach. But it might also alter precipitation patterns or result in a burst of warming if the programme were suddenly halted.
More complex temperature targets won't help. Discussions have begun around the concept of ‘overshoot', in which the planet's average temperature would be brought back to 1.5 °C by 2100 after a period exceeding that level4. But its achievement would be even harder to pin down. While in overshoot, no one can be sure whether it is permanent or temporary. A successful return to 1.5 °C could be confirmed only at the end of the century.
Any approach based on projections to 2100 is unlikely to inspire public interest or political action because the goal is so far off. It is hubristic to think that researchers can predict accurately how emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence will affect the climate, or how Earth's climate system itself will respond to unprecedented conditions.
Instead, we propose that policymakers focus on rapidly building the clean-energy systems that can deliver the safer climate and thriving economies that populations demand. These goals are already agreed. For example, in 2023 at the UN Conference of the Parties (COP) 28 climate summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, countries called for a tripling of renewable-energy capacity globally by 2030 and the transition away from fossil fuels to reach net zero by 2050. Whereas delegates at COP30 in Belém, Brazil, in 2025, struggled to agree to phase out fossil fuels, support for accelerating clean energy is almost universal.
To fulfil this mandate, the world needs one clear number with which to measure climate progress during a transition that ends the use of fossil fuels. We think the most promising metric is one we term the ‘clean-energy shift'. Building on a concept initially proposed by Bloomberg New Energy Finance founder Michael Liebreich (see go.nature.com/3zr5y1), we define it as the growth rate in clean-energy generation minus the growth rate in total energy demand for a given time interval.
This metric emphasizes that clean-energy supply must expand faster than overall energy demand for decarbonization. When the percentage growth of clean-energy supply exceeds the growth in total energy use, fossil fuels get squeezed out of the system. By contrast, simply measuring clean energy share is insufficient, because fossil fuels might also rise overall to meet extra demand.
Clouds of steam emanate from a geothermal plant in Iceland.Credit: Getty
For example, if clean-energy grows by 6% each year and total energy demand grows by 3%, the clean-energy shift is +3%, meaning that clean energy is displacing fossil energy as a share of total energy generation. The bigger the number, the faster the exit from fossil fuels.
Clean-energy shift measures progress in a positive way5, towards a 100% clean economy, rather than negatively towards net zero. This would reduce the political resistance that arises from the perceived economic sacrifice of limiting emissions. Chasing the number zero will never motivate politicians concerned about economic development. Framing decarbonization as a story of building clean-energy industries and jobs is more appealing. The metric points to policies that are politically feasible, economically desirable and already advancing rapidly technologically, including solar, wind, batteries, geothermal, hydro and nuclear — without picking winners.
The power of pursuing this approach is evident in recent energy trends. Between 2018 and 2020, the annual percentage growth of clean-energy generation rose sharply, driven by rapid additions of solar, wind and storage capacities. Total global energy demand also grew, but at a slower rate, implying that growth in clean-energy production began eating into the share of fossil fuels. If this clean-energy shift can be increased further, the world would see a peak and then a steady decline in fossil-fuel use and related emissions. Indeed, data from China suggest the nation's emissions peak could come as soon as this year6.
It is up to policymakers to determine how high the clean-energy shift should be. For example, to eliminate fossil fuels by 2050, the metric would need to rise substantially, from around 4% over the past five years, and keep climbing through the 2030s and 2040s. This means that clean-energy generation must continue its current rapid growth, rising several percentage points faster than total energy demand each year.
Although challenging, trends in solar, wind and storage deployment suggest that this acceleration is achievable — although it will require expanded manufacturing capacity, grids built to integrate renewable technologies, continued reductions in battery costs and political will.
To achieve global decarbonization by 2050, policymakers need short-term milestones. We suggest they might set global targets of clean-energy shifts in five-year intervals — like rungs on a ladder, each climbing closer to a safe climate. It should be noted that the intervals are non-linear in terms of added capacity: because clean-energy shift is a percentage-growth metric, the higher rungs reflect increasingly rapid rates of clean-energy expansion, rather than a constant yearly addition.
Encouragingly, the world has already climbed the first two rungs. We calculate an average shift of about 3.4% during 2014–19, rising to about 5.7% in 2024. The next rungs would need to sustain or increase these numbers to enable a fossil-fuels exit by 2050. Lower numbers would mean fossil fuels staying longer as part of the energy mix.
Climate change is devastating mining of minerals needed to fight it
Climate change is devastating mining of minerals needed to fight it
These intervals can be aligned with the five-year timelines used by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) policy process, such as major COP agreements, reviews of ‘nationally determined contributions' and ‘global stocktakes' of progress towards the Paris goals for emissions reductions.
The clean-energy shift metric also respects long-established UN principles of equity and accountability, including the concept of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities' in climate policy. The metric would not be a legally binding top-down number but the upward product of the collective efforts of all countries, which would continue to determine their own energy policies.
Individual countries can use the metric to track their own progress. And several major emitters already include clean-energy targets in their Paris commitments. For example, India met its 50% non-fossil power capacity goal five years ahead of its 2030 target. China has more than doubled its wind and solar capacity over the past three years. The European Union currently has about one-quarter of its energy consumption supplied by renewable sources, which it has mandated should rise to 42.5% within five years.
No metric can cover everything. And the clean-energy shift excludes emissions from sources other than fossil fuels, such as greenhouse gases resulting from deforestation, soil cultivation or wildfires. But the climate damage caused by fossil fuels is unique in its scale — comprising 90% of the carbon dioxide problem (38 of 42 gigatonnes in 2024)7.
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Approaching 1.5 °C: how will we know we've reached this crucial warming mark?
Don't scrap climate COPs, reform them
Climate change is devastating mining of minerals needed to fight it
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Why the green-technology race might not save the planet
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The energy efficiency of heat engines (gas and steam turbines) for electricity production and propulsion is determined by the Carnot cycle and scales with operating temperature. Commercial nickel- and cobalt-based superalloys melt near 1,500 °C and rapidly lose mechanical strength beyond 1,000 °C. Refractory metals melt well above 2,000 °C but have inherent manufacturability challenges that are barriers to adoption, such as high ductile-to-brittle transition temperatures. Using density functional theory-guided design, we demonstrate tailored local lattice distortions that promote phase-stable, non-equiatomic refractory concentrated solid solutions with both high ductility and strength. We exemplify this for single-phase, body-centred cubic Nb4Ta4V3Ti that exhibits castability, excellent room-temperature tensile yield strength (∼1 GPa) and ductility (approaching 20% uniform strain), and exceptional high-temperature tensile strength (500 MPa at 1,000 °C). These findings illustrate a path for designing materials that hold great potential for advancing next-generation technologies such as Generation IV fission reactors, first-generation fusion-plasma reactors, and more efficient gas turbines for electricity generation and propulsion.
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N.A., H.H., P.S., D.D.J., G.O., L.G., R.T.O. and T.R. were supported by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) programme at Ames National Laboratory (theory and computation) and the US Department of Energy (DOE) Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) office (experiments). The majority of the research was performed at the Ames National Laboratory, which is operated for the US DOE by the Iowa State University under contract DE-AC02-07CH11358. R.B., V.S. and T.W.S. were supported by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) under grant FA9550-21-1-0304. R.B., V.S. and T.W.S. were also supported by a DOE FES RENEW award DE-SC0024541. This work was in part performed at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, an Office of Science User Facility operated for the US DOE Office of Science by Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories. Sandia National Laboratories is a multiprogramme laboratory managed and operated by National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International, Inc., for the US DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-NA0003525. Financial support for ultrahigh-temperature tensile testing was provided by D. Shifler and the US Office of Naval Research (ONR) under grant number N000141812180. This paper describes objective technical results and analysis. Any subjective views or opinions that might be expressed in the paper do not necessarily represent the views of the US DOE or the US Government.
Dishant Beniwal
Present address: X-ray Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, IL, USA
Division of Materials Science and Engineering, Ames National Laboratory, Ames, IA, USA
Hailong Huang, Prashant Singh, Duane D. Johnson, Gaoyuan Ouyang, Luke Gaydos, Trevor Riedemann, Andrew B. Kustas, Ryan T. Ott & Nicolas Argibay
Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA
Duane D. Johnson, Luke Gaydos & Nicolas Argibay
Metallurgical and Materials Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Ropar, Rupnagar, India
Dishant Beniwal & Pratik K. Ray
Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA
Tirthesh Ingale, Vishal Soni, Rajarshi Banerjee & Thomas W. Scharf
Material, Physical, and Chemical Science Center, Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM, USA
Ping Lu, Frank W. DelRio & Andrew B. Kustas
RTX Technology Research Center, East Hartford, CT, USA
John A. Sharon & Ryan Deacon
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA
Syed I. A. Jalali, Michael Patullo & Kevin J. Hemker
Department of Materials Science & Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA
Sharon Park & Kevin J. Hemker
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H.H. contributed to all aspects of the experimental work, data analysis, and interpretation, writing, and editing. P.S. and D.D.J. contributed to all aspects of the theory and computation work, conception, data analysis and interpretation, writing, and editing. D.B. and P.K.R. contributed to data curation and visualization. T.I., V.S., T.W.S. and R.B. performed SEM and EBSD analysis of deformed microstructures and APT, related data analysis and interpretation, and writing. G.O. contributed to materials synthesis and processing, mechanical testing, data analysis, and writing. L.G. and T.R. contributed to materials synthesis and processing, mechanical testing, and analysis, and writing. P.L. performed TEM analysis and contributed to data interpretation and writing. F.W.D. performed nanoindentation testing and contributed to writing. A.B.K. and R.T.O. contributed to data analysis and interpretation, editing and project management. J.A.S. and R.D. performed tensile sample preparation for high-temperature testing, contributed to analysis and interpretation, and writing. S.I.A.J., M.P., S.P. and K.J.H. performed high-temperature tensile testing and contributed to data analysis, interpretation and writing. N.A. contributed to conception, analysis and interpretation, writing, editing and project management.
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Nicolas Argibay.
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January 26, 2026
NASA gears up for a historic lunar flyby, AI gives stroke patients hope, and researchers discover the oldest known cave art
What's on the road to the launch of NASA's Artemis II, how scientists are using artificial intelligence to help stroke patients speak, and what an Indonesian cave art discovery says about early human migration
By Kendra Pierre-Louis, Lee Billings, Sushmita Pathak, Kelso Harper & Alex Sugiura
NurPhoto/GettyImages
Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American's Science Quickly, I'm Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman. You're listening to our weekly science news roundup.
First, we have an update on humans going back to the moon.
In the coming weeks the first launch window will open for NASA's Artemis II mission. The planned lunar flyby will be the first crewed mission to go beyond low-Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972.
If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.
To learn more about it we chatted with Lee Billings, SciAm's senior desk editor for physical science. Here he is.
Lee Billings: Artemis is NASA's mission to send astronauts back to the moon. It's been in development in various forms, under various guises, for 20 years now. Artemis II is really where the rubber meets the road. There was, obviously, Artemis I, but Artemis I was uncrewed—there were no astronauts on board. It was just meant to show that the key hardware components work properly, that they can get into space and go to the moon and come back. And now we are doing that with humans on board, so it's much higher stakes.
Artemis II is not going to land on the moon. It's not even going to orbit the moon. Some people get confused about that. It's going to be on what's called a free-return trajectory, which means it's going to use the moon's gravity to loop around our natural satellite and then send the Orion capsule, the Orion spacecraft, back to Earth at very high speeds. And so that means there will be some interesting spaceflight records being broken. One would be that the crew of Artemis II will be the farthest humans from Earth ever. They'll also be the fastest humans in history 'cause when they return and they hit the atmosphere of the Earth, they're gonna be going about 25,000 miles per hour, quite fast, and let's hope that heat shield holds up.
In terms of things that it's going to be studying, it's a mix of a lot of human studies and space-medicine studies. The four astronauts that will be on board this mission, looping around the moon, will be instrumented and sensored all up. They'll have all kinds of biometrics coming off them. And we'll be doing that to have a better idea of how humans respond to the deep-space environment for notional future missions that will go to the surface of the moon, with Artemis III and onwards.
And, and so where we are now with Artemis II is that on January 17 it rolled out, in this very prestigious and ceremonial proceeding, rolled out from the Vehicle Assembly Building, this giant building that NASA has at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. And it was loaded on this giant diesel-electric tractor, essentially, to slowly, glacially go at about a pace of a mile an hour or so, from, the Vehicle Assembly Building to the actual launch pad where it will launch from.
The next big step is going to be something called the “wet dress rehearsal”; this is slated for February 2. And what that is, is when they pump cryogenic propellant fuel into the rocket so that they can see that it's able to withstand all the pressures of all that fuel going in, making sure there's no leaks or anything like that. And hopefully, we won't see any leaks because if we do see a bunch of leaks, then it'll probably delay what is supposed to be the onset of the launch window, which is February 6. And each month there's about five days that the moon and the Earth are aligned so that, you know, we can pull this launch off, so if they miss that kind of five-day window in early February, well, we're looking to March.
And why do we wanna go back to the moon? Well, a big part of it is geopolitics. We are no longer in this world of, like, the Cold War and the kind of golden age of the space race. It's a new way now. There's more players. India wants to go to the moon. China is going to the moon. And a big question now is whether or not we can beat them back to the moon, even though we already did it more than 50 years ago.
There are extremely interesting scientific questions as well. For instance, the places that people wanna go on the moon for this new generation of missions, it's largely concentrated around the lunar south pole, which is where we know there are deposits of water ice and other types of volatiles. This is a very special region that has near-constant illumination from the sun but also permanently shadowed craters. And that region of the moon also is important because it could tell us a lot about how the moon formed and its history and evolution over time.
And finally, a lot of the, the south pole and the regions of interest are actually on the lunar farside, the part that people don't see from Earth, and that's important because you can build various types of facilities there to do cutting-edge science, such as a giant radio telescope to peer back to, essentially, the beginning of time. And you can do that there and be totally shielded from the Earth-based radio interference you would otherwise receive that would scuttle all your measurements.
Pierre-Louis: For more on NASA's lunar mission go to ScientificAmerican.com.
Coming back to Earth a team led by University of Cambridge researchers may have found a way to give some patients their voice back after having a stroke. The key, researchers say, is a new device called Revoice.
You see, roughly half of all patients who experience a stroke also develop dysarthria, which weakens the muscles used for speech and breath control. The condition can cause slurred, slow or strained speech. It's not that the patient doesn't know what they want to say; it's that they struggle to say it.
The good news is that with rehabilitation many patients regain their speech, but the process can take anywhere from months to years. Given that recovery is possible for patients, the scientists behind the new study wanted to help patients communicate faster than existing technologies that require letter-by-letter input.
The Revoice device the scientists developed consists of a soft collar embedded with sensors that track throat movement and heart rate and provide that information to two AI agents. Both of these agents process the data using a large language model. One of the agents reconstructs words from silently mouthed speech and vibrations in the throat. The other then expands those words into full sentences by using the wearer's pulse to analyze their emotional state and detecting broader ambient conditions, including the weather and time of day. Combined, the system can anticipate what the person is trying to say and, with just two nods of their head, speak for them.
There are some limitations to the research: the study, published last Monday in the journal Nature Communications, had a small sample size of just five patients. But the researchers plan on expanding the study to a clinical trial. If the results hold, Revoice could be a useful tool not only for stroke patients but also for those with other neurological conditions, including Parkinson's disease.
In other news about communication a study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature reveals the oldest cave art reportedly ever found. Previously, the oldest-known cave art were depictions of a pig and three humanlike figures thought to be over 51,000 years old. That art was found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.
This new discovery was found on the same island but in a different cave. Ordinarily, it's hard to date cave paintings. But the limestone caves of Sulawesi are easier to work with. In fact the cave had been previously studied, but the new painting—a hand stencil on the ceiling—was overlooked. A chemical analysis found that the stencil dated back some 67,800 years at least, making it roughly 15,000 years older than the previously discovered cave art.
This discovery could help us pinpoint when humans first settled in Australia. Archaeologists suspect that humans migrated there through Indonesia but have been unable to determine the exact time frame.
Franco Viviani, a physical anthropologist who was not involved in the new study, told SciAm that the findings also offer new insight into ancient societies, saying, quote, “They confirm what is known today: that art is positively correlated to critical thinking and creative problem-solving skills.”
And speaking of creative problem solvers a new study on bats sheds some light on how these winged mammals get around. Every school-age kid at some point learns that bats are able to navigate in darkness using echolocation—that is, they send out a call and based on how the sound bounces back they can tell where an object is. But scientists have long wondered how bats navigate in object-rich environments.
A single bat call will send back echoes ricocheting off multiple objects from various directions and distances. In complex situations scientists figured it wasn't really possible for a bat to analyze each individual echo, so they must be relying on an alternative strategy. Finding out exactly how bats might be navigating these kinds of environments was the focus of a study published Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
To study this the research team constructed what they called a “bat accelerator” machine lined with 8,000 movable acoustic reflectors, or fake leaves. The goal was to mimic the experience of a bat flying through a hedge covered in real leaves. Over the course of three nights 104 pipistrelle bats went through the full eight meters, or roughly 26 feet, of the test track.
The results suggested that bats are sensitive to the Doppler shift, the same phenomena you experience when an ambulance siren shifts in pitch as it drives past you. According to the study, by paying attention to sound changes based on their own movement the bats are able to assess their surroundings and control their speed. The researchers say their findings could be useful in advancing drone technology in the future.
That's all for today's episode. Tune in on Wednesday, when we'll dig into the nascent science of what foods make people stink.
But before you go we'd like to ask you for help for a future episode—it's about kissing. Tell us about your most memorable kiss. What made it special? How did it feel? Record a voice memo on your phone or computer, and send it over to ScienceQuickly@sciam.com. Be sure to include your name and where you're from.
Science Quickly is produced by me, Kendra Pierre-Louis, along with Fonda Mwangi, Sushmita Pathak and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
For Scientific American, this is Kendra Pierre-Louis. Have a great week!
Kendra Pierre-Louis is a climate reporter focusing on the science and social impacts of climate change. She has worked for Gimlet, Bloomberg News and Popular Science. Pierre-Louis is based in New York City.
Lee Billings is a science journalist specializing in astronomy, physics, planetary science, and spaceflight and is senior desk editor for physical science at Scientific American. He is author of a critically acclaimed book, Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars, which in 2014 won a Science Communication Award from the American Institute of Physics. In addition to his work for Scientific American, Billings's writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, Wired, New Scientist, Popular Science and many other publications. Billings joined Scientific American in 2014 and previously worked as a staff editor at SEED magazine. He holds a B.A. in journalism from the University of Minnesota.
Sushmita Pathak is a multimedia editor at Scientific American and a producer of Science Quickly. She previously worked at NPR and was a regular contributor to The World from PRX and The Christian Science Monitor. Her science reporting has appeared in WIRED, Science Magazine, Undark, EOS, and more.
Kelso Harper is an award-winning senior multimedia editor at Scientific American. As a producer, editor and host, they work on short documentaries, social videos and Scientific American's podcast Science Quickly. They have a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Johns Hopkins University and a master's degree in science writing from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Previously, they worked with Wired, Science, Popular Mechanics, and MIT News. Follow them on LinkedIn and Instagram.
Alex Sugiura is a Peabody and Pulitzer Prize–winning composer, editor and podcast producer based in Brooklyn, N.Y. He has worked on projects for Bloomberg, Axios, Crooked Media and Spotify, among others.
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Chinese calligraphy can be traced back more than 3,000 years to the carving of characters onto animal bones for divination. Credit: Billy H.C. Kwok/Bloomberg/Getty
Tools of the Scribe: How Writing Systems, Technology, and Human Factors Interact to Affect the Act of Writing Brian Roark et al. Springer (2025)
The world's oldest writing system still in use, that of Chinese characters, dates from about 1200 bc. It has survived almost as long as its even older predecessors. For instance, cuneiform — comprising wedge-shaped marks inscribed in clay tablets with a stylus — was used in ancient Mesopotamia until the first century ad and Egyptian hieroglyphs remained in use until the fourth century ad. Moreover, Chinese characters were central to the development of writing systems in several other cultures, notably those of Japan and Korea.
How the world's largest language family spread — and why others go extinct
How the world's largest language family spread — and why others go extinct
Yet today, millions of people who speak and read Chinese have forgotten how to compose many of the traditional characters by hand, relying instead on simpler phonetic and digital equivalents. This controversial trend in China, generally known as character amnesia, opens Tools of the Scribe, a stimulating and original, if technical, book by computational linguists Brian Roark, Richard Sproat and Su-Youn Yoon.
The book explores how “the implement, the medium, the writing system and the writer” interact to produce text. The authors analyse the linguistic structure of writing systems ranging from ancient cuneiform to modern alphabets; the technologies that have shaped writing in both the past and the present; and the processes underlying computer-based ‘scribes', including large language models. Although their main focus is on technology, the authors draw on research in many fields, including psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, ergonomics, anthropology and speech and language pathology.
Chinese characters illustrate this interaction between implement, medium, system and writer vividly. Their first incarnation was in ‘oracle bones' used for divination during the Shang dynasty (about 1600 bc to 1046 bc). Notches were drilled and chiselled into the surfaces of turtle shells and ox scapulae, such that when heat was applied, cracks would appear. These cracks were interpreted by a diviner to answer questions posed by the Shang king. The answers were often written on the bones using symbols — many of them recognizable antecedents of modern Chinese characters.
Subsequently, during the late Shang (about 1250 bc to 1046 bc) and Western Zhou (about 1046 bc to 771 bc) dynasties, inscriptions on bronze vessels were used to record ancestor worship, royal decrees, military victories, land grants, marriages and family histories. Then, during the latter half of the first millennium bc, the characters evolved into a more complex calligraphic form, painted in ink with a brush or pen on bamboo or paper: an art form still practised today. In ad 868, Chinese script was used to write the world's oldest extant printed book: a paper scroll known as The Diamond Sutra, which records a dialogue between the Buddha and a senior monk.
The script's complexity increased over time, from some 4,500 characters initially to roughly 47,000 by the eighteenth century. Today, almost 100,000 characters are listed in Unicode — the international character-encoding standard. However, around the start of the twentieth century, the system hit a technological barrier: the typewriter. The first commercial typewriter, designed for simple Western alphabets, was launched in 1874. By contrast, several attempts to commercialize a Chinese typewriter, beginning in 1919, were unsuccessful owing to the quantity and complexity of Chinese characters.
Many university students use chatbots powered by large language models, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, to help write assignments.Credit: Alamy
In 1936, Mao Zedong, leader of the Chinese Communist Party and a devoted calligrapher, announced in his first interview with a Western journalist that “sooner or later, we believe, we will have to abandon the Chinese character altogether if we are to create a new social culture in which the masses fully participate”. After Mao's government came to power in 1949, it began to simplify characters by eliminating some variants and reducing the number of strokes in many of those remaining. In 1958, officials introduced a romanized Chinese script (using Latin letters) called Pinyin (which translates as spelled sounds) as the modern system for writing the Chinese sounds — hence the modern spelling of Peking as Beijing.
Many people now rely on Pinyin to input Chinese characters into digital devices. What Chinese speakers have gained in ease of writing thanks to modern technology has come “at the cost of losing practice with the neuromotor infrastructure needed to maintain their complex script”, the authors write. Nevertheless, Chinese characters continue to dominate China's non-digital communication as a symbol of national identity.
The technology of writing has changed radically over the centuries — both in China and elsewhere. However, until the late twentieth century, the technologies used to input text were passive, the authors observe. Styluses, chisels, brushes, pens, woodblocks, movable type and typewriters gave the writer full control over what appeared on the writing surface. By contrast, computers can now suggest alternative spellings or synonyms, automatically correct errors and — with the advance of artificial intelligence — even write a whole text. As a result, “the notion of ‘writer' itself becomes unclear”, the authors note.
The book dives into the challenges surrounding the increasing use of AI systems by students. In a 2024 survey, 96% of US university students reported having used OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot for at least one project in that academic year, and 69% had done so for writing assignments (see go.nature.com/4pyzbyv). In another study, US secondary-school students used ChatGPT mainly to plan essays (S. Levine et al. J. Adolesc. Adult Lit. 68, 445–457; 2025). However, they tended to accept or reject the tool's suggested edits as a whole, instead of examining each suggestion separately “to learn from their mistakes”.
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Nature 649, 1099-1101 (2026)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-00245-0
The author declares no competing interests.
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Nature Microbiology
(2026)Cite this article
Pseudomonadota (formerly Proteobacteria) are prevalent in the commensal human gut microbiota, but also include many pathogens that rely on secretion systems to support pathogenicity by injecting proteins into host cells. Here we show that 80% of Pseudomonadota from healthy gut microbiomes also have intact type III secretion systems (T3SS). Candidate effectors predicted by machine learning display sequence and structural features that are distinct from those of pathogen effectors. Towards a systems-level functional understanding, we experimentally constructed a protein–protein meta-interactome map between human proteins and commensal effectors. Network analyses uncovered that effector-targeted neighbourhoods are enriched for genetic variation linked to microbiome-associated conditions, including autoimmune and metabolic diseases. Metagenomic analysis revealed effector enrichment in Crohn's disease but depletion in ulcerative colitis. Functionally, commensal effectors can translocate into human cells and modulate NF-κB signalling and cytokine secretion in vitro. Our findings indicate that T3SS contribute to microorganism–host cohabitation and that effector–host protein interactions may represent an underappreciated route by which commensal gut microbiota influences health.
Host-associated microbiota influences human health in complex, genotype-dependent ways. Especially the human gut microbiome, which is dominated by Firmicutes, Bacteroidetes and Pseudomonadota1 (formerly Proteobacteria2), can alter the risk of diverse conditions, including metabolic disorders, and autoimmune and neurodegenerative diseases3. However, the underlying molecular mechanisms are incompletely understood. Most studies have focused on metabolites, extracellular microorganism-associated molecular patterns, or community-level microbiome properties4. However, the role of intracellular bacteria–host protein interactions is largely unexplored. The potential impact of such interkingdom protein interactions is illustrated by viral proteins in asymptomatic or non-acute infections, which can influence cellular signalling and cell physiology and thereby contribute to complex diseases in a likely host-genetics dependent manner5,6,7,8.
In bacteria, the type III secretion system (T3SS) is a well-characterized apparatus for delivering proteins into eukaryotic cells. The T3SS is a highly conserved ‘needle and syringe'-like machinery found in Pseusomonadota to inject bacterial proteins into host cells9. T3SS and their substrate effectors have been studied almost exclusively in human and plant pathogens such as Yersinia, Pseudomonas or Salmonella, for which protein translocation is a key pathogenic strategy. In the host, translocated effectors manipulate cellular processes including cytoskeletal dynamics or immune signalling to ensure bacterial survival and promote transmission9. Thus, the T3SS has traditionally been framed as a virulence determinant.
Insights from plant and insect systems challenge this pathogen-centric view of the T3SS. Many commensal and beneficial microorganisms for these hosts deploy T3SS or analogous machinery to translocate proteins that promote symbiosis or fine-tune host immunity10,11,12. Effector–host protein–protein interaction maps in plants further reveal that both pathogenic and mutualistic microorganisms converge on central host signalling nodes, suggesting conserved principles by which injected proteins can modulate eukaryotic biology across diverse symbioses12,13,14.
Despite the emerging broader conceptual importance of protein injection and cross-kingdom protein interactions in diverse microorganism–host systems, it is unknown whether analogous mechanisms operate in the healthy human gut. Here we investigate the distribution, diversity and host interactions of T3SS and their effectors in commensal Pseudomonadota from human guts. By integrating comparative genomics, structural prediction, functional assays and host protein interaction networks, we uncover an underappreciated layer of direct, protein-mediated communication between commensal microorganisms and the human host, with implications for immune modulation, microbial competition and complex disease biology.
We first analysed reference genomes of Pseudomonadota strains from healthy gut and stool samples isolated, for example, by the human microbiome project15. Using EffectiveDB16, a widely used tool for secretion system identification, we detected complete T3SS in 44 of the 77 genomes (Supplementary Data 1). To expand the scope, we analysed genomes of 4,752 phylogenetically diverse strains of the human intestinal bacteria collection (HiBC)17, Broad Institute–OpenBiome Microbiome Library (BIO–ML)18 and Global Microbiome Conservancy (GMC)19. Of the 568 Pseudomonadota genomes, 449 (79%) have complete T3SS (Extended Data Fig. 1); similar proportions have T4SS (315) and T6SS (474), which may also inject effectors into host cells among other functions20 (Extended Data Fig. 1 and Supplementary Data 2). Together, 527 of the 568 Pseudomonatoda genomes (92%) have at least one host-directed secretion system. Because culturing can bias taxon representations, we also screened 16,179 high- and intermediate-quality Pseudomonadota metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs)21,22,23, finding complete T3SS in 770 (5%) MAGs (Extended Data Fig. 1 and Supplementary Data 3). Notably, T3SS were only detected in Gammaproteobacteria, but not in Beta- or Epsilon-proteobacteria (except in Helicobacter strains), and were especially common among Escherichia (Fig. 1a and Supplementary Data 3). Among the T3SS-positive (T3SS+) species, 24 matched representatives in two cohorts of the Weizmann Institute of Science24: 59.4% of individuals in the Israeli and 47.1% in the Dutch cohort harboured potentially T3SS+ species in their gut microbiome at 0.80% and 0.48% relative abundance, respectively, with Escherichia coli being the most common. These observations indicate that T3SS+ strains are common members of the human gut microbiota and motivated our further investigation.
a, Most abundant genera, species and genomes encoding complete T3SS among reference strains and MAGs from the human gut. b, Sequence similarity of 3,002 candidate commensal T3SS effectors with 1,195 effectors from pathogenic bacteria across alignment coverages (bottom left). Each dot represents a pairwise sequence comparison. Dot colour indicates effectors with significant and non-significant Jackhmmer results (inset legend) indicating homology to pathogen effectors. Marginal histograms display the aggregated distribution of alignment coverage (top) and aggregated sequence similarity (right), with colour indicating Jackhmmer outcome. c, Left, number of the structure clusters observed in FoldSeek analysis (red arrow) compared to random expectation for that group (homogeneous or mixed) in grey (exp. empirical P < 0.0001, n = 10,000, two-sided label permutation test). Middle, example structures for one cluster in the group; small networks are representative structure clusters for the group with an anchor structure in the centre and similar structures connected by links. Donut plots: proportion of proteins with origins indicated by colour in all clusters of (homogeneous or mixed) the structure-cluster group. d, Selection of 18 commensal Pseudomonadota strains for subsequent functional analyses. Numbers indicate the count of shared effectors at >90% mutual sequence similarity across 90% sequence length. e, Injection of indicated effectors by wild-type and ΔsctV (T3SS-defective) Salmonella Typhimurium into HeLa cells detected by luminescence of reconstituted nano-luciferase (y axis). Control pathogen effectors (left): sseJ (A0A0F6B1Q8), sopA (Q8ZNR3) and pipB2 (A0A0F6B5H5) from Salmonella Typhimurium; yopJ (A0A0N9NCU6) from Yersinia pseudotuberculosis; and ipaH9.8 (Q8VSC3) and ospG (Q99PZ6) from Shigella flexneri. SipA is an assay control used as reference. Asterisks denote statistically significant differences between the wild-type and ΔsctV-negative strains (two-sided Wilcoxon test; five biological repeats with four technical repeats each). f, Injection of effectors from gut commensal Edwardsiella tarda into HeLa cells. SipA tested in wild-type and ΔsctV Salmonella Typhimurium were used as positive and negative controls, respectively (two-sided Wilcoxon test, *P < 0.05, **P < 0.001; NS, not significant; seven biological repeats with four technical repeats each). Raw data and precise P values for all panels are found in Supplementary Data 1, 3, 5, 6 and 10 as described in Supplementary Information. Boxplots (e,f) show the median (centre line) and the interquartile range (IQR, box), with whiskers extending to minimum and maximum values within 1.5× IQR.
Source data
Using three complementary machine-learning models25,26,27, 3,002 effector candidates were confidently predicted in the T3SS+ reference genomes (hereafter: strain effectors) (Supplementary Data 4) and 182 in the 770 T3SS+ MAGs (meta-effectors) (Supplementary Data 4). Because T3SS effectors are classically associated with pathogenicity, we compared these candidate effectors to 1,195 T3SS effectors of known pathogens28. Only 17 out of 3,002 (0.5%) strain effectors and 6 out of 182 (3%) meta-effectors showed high sequence similarity to those of pathogens (≥90% across ≥90% length) (Supplementary Data 5). To find weak similarities, we performed iterative jackhmmer29 searches against ~124 M non-redundant bacterial sequences from UniRef90. Yet, even with this sensitive approach, significant similarity to pathogen effectors was found only for 155 commensal strain effectors (~5%) and 42 meta-effectors (22.5%) (Fig. 1b and Extended Data Fig. 1).
As effectors can be structurally related despite sequence divergence, we clustered AlphaFold30-predicted tertiary structures using FoldSeek31 for a structural comparison. Surprisingly, homogeneous clusters with effectors from only commensal strains or pathogens were highly overrepresented, whereas mixed clusters II and III, reflecting common structures of effectors from pathogens and commensal strains, were depleted (Fig. 1c and Supplementary Data 6; P << 0,0001, empirical P values). Meta-effectors clustered exclusively with strain effectors, albeit close to random expectation. All results were robust over varying FoldSeek parameters and when considering only vertebrate or human pathogens (Supplementary Data 6). Thus, candidate effectors in T3SS+ strains from healthy human guts markedly differ from pathogen effectors in both sequence and structure.
We analysed all candidate effectors from the strains for annotated domains. Besides 860 proteins without any identifiable domain, among the most common finds were the diguanylate cyclase, GGDEF domain (PF00990) (58 effectors), and EAL domain (PF00563) (50 effectors), none of which was found in pathogen effectors (Supplementary Data 5). Cyclic diguanylate is a known second messenger in bacterial signal transduction, and the EAL domain is thought to be a diguanylate phosphodiesterase, thus opposing the effect of the cyclase32. Furthermore, we observed a PAS-fold domain (PF08447) in 32 effectors, which can function as a ligand-binding sensor32 and in some effectors co-occurs with a guanylate cyclase domain. As cyclic dinucleotides recently emerged as important immune regulators in all kingdoms of life33, the observation that two domains acting on the same second messenger occur at high frequency among the commensal effector candidates makes a role for this signalling molecule in interkingdom communication plausible.
A key question is whether commensal candidate effectors get injected into human cells by T3SS. To enable functional studies, we cloned open reading frames (ORFs) encoding effectors from 18 bacterial strains (Fig. 1d, Extended Data Fig. 1, Supplementary Table 9 and Supplementary Data 7 and 8). The generated human microbiome effector ORFeome v1 (HuMEOme_v1) contains 910 sequence-verified, full-length ORFs representing 746 strain effectors and 164 meta-effectors (Supplementary Data 7). Cloning failure mainly resulted from failed PCR amplification without indications of toxicity. Using Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica sv. Typhimurium (S. Typhimurium) as a model, we established a nano-luciferase-based injection assay34 fusing an 11-amino acid Nano-Luc HiBiT tag to the C terminus of candidate effectors expressed in bacteria. HeLa cells stably expressed the complementary LgBiT fragment, so that effector injection reconstitutes functional nano-luciferase. Specificity was ensured by inclusion of the T3SS-defective ΔsctV mutant for all tests. Benchmarking with six pathogen effectors demonstrated effective translocation of four. Among 97 tested candidate effectors from 11 strains, 32 were specifically and significantly injected (Fig. 1e, Extended Data Fig. 1, Supplementary Table 9 and Supplementary Data 10). The slightly higher success rate for the positive controls probably reflects phylogenetic diversity and missing chaperones and cofactors. Thus, although some false effector identifications cannot be excluded, overall, our pipeline reliably identified bona fide T3SS substrate effectors from commensal strains in healthy human guts.
Next, we assessed the functionality of T3SS in the commensals. Of the 11 strains with at least one T3SS-injectable effector, 6 could not be tested due to antibiotic resistance or transformation failure. Whereas the two E. coli strains yielded no signals, Citrobacter pasteurii and Phytobacter massiliensis showed occasional signals suggesting sporadic activation of the T3SS. By contrast, Edwardsiella tarda reproducibly and significantly injected three out of four tested effectors into HeLa cells (Fig. 1f and Supplementary Data 10). Notably, only one, Eta_3, was also positive in the Salmonella system, supporting the notion that missing cofactors may have caused false negatives in the first experiment. Overall, these data demonstrate that functional T3SS are present in strains from healthy human guts and can deliver identified effectors into human cells.
Next, we explored possible functions of the commensal effectors by systematically mapping their physical interactions with host proteins using our multi-assay mapping pipeline35 (Extended Data Fig. 2). Screening all cloned effectors against the full human ORFeome9.136 identified 1,067 interactions constituting the human-microbiome meta-interactome (HuMMI) main dataset (HuMMIMAIN) (Fig. 2a). Three repeat screens with 290 effectors and 1,440 human proteins yielded 39 interactions (HuMMIRPT) and indicated a sampling sensitivity of ~32% for the main screen (Fig. 2b), matching previous studies37. Lastly, we addressed how sequence similarity affects effector interaction profiles. We grouped effectors with ≥30% sequence identity (Supplementary Data 11) and experimentally tested them against the union of their interactors from the main screen. The resulting HuMMIHOM dataset contains 394 interactions, of which 181 are non-redundant. Altogether, HuMMI contains 1,255 unique verified interactions between 286 effectors and 426 human proteins (Fig. 2a and Supplementary Data 11).
a, Verified human microbiome meta-interactome (HuMMI) map; coloured nodes indicate effectors from strains according to colour legend in f. Grey nodes represent human proteins; outer layer human proteins are targeted only by the nearest strain, central human proteins by effectors from multiple strains. b, Sampling sensitivity: saturation curve calculated from HuMMIRPT. Red dots represent the average of verified interactions found in any combination of indicated number of repeat screens; diamonds denote interaction counts per experiment over all sequential experiment combinations; error bars indicate standard deviation; black dots and line represent calculated saturation curve. c, Assay sensitivity: percentage of identified interactions from bhLit_BM-v1 (n = 54 pairs), bhRRS-v1 (n = 72 pairs), hsPRS-v2 (n = 60 pairs) and hsRRS-v2 (n = 78 pairs) in the Y2H system used for network mapping. Error bars represent the s.e. of proportion. d, Validation rate of a random sample of HuMMI interactions (n = 294 pair configurations) compared to four reference sets in the yN2H validation assay: bhLit_BM-v1 (n = 94 pair configurations), bhRRS-v1 (n = 144 pair configurations), hsPRS-v2 (n = 44 pair configurations) and hrRRS-v2 (n = 51 pair configurations). Two-sided Fisher's exact test, *P = 0.04, ***P = 0.0006 (Supplementary Data 14). Error bars represent s.e. of proportion. e, Co-immunoprecipitation of MYC-tagged human proteins by Flag-tagged effectors or Flag–GFP as negative control. Input, cell lysates; green dots, successful co-immunoprecipitation; red dot, no co-immunoprecipitation; effector espG of Escherichia coli (Q7DB50) as positive control (one biological replicate). Molecular mass markers are given in kilodaltons. f, Most-targeted human proteins interacting with the indicated number of effectors from different strains. Colours represent strains according to indicated legend (full statistics in Supplementary Data 11). g, Most highly connected effectors interacting with the indicated number of human proteins (Supplementary Data 11). h, Observed number of effector-interacting human proteins compared to random expectation (two-sided permutation test, P < 0.0001; n = 10,000). i, Frequency distribution of human proteins targeted by effectors from the indicated number of different strains (red) compared to random expectation (two-sided permutation test, P = 0.004; n = 10,000).
Source data
To experimentally assess data quality, we assembled a positive control set of 67 well-documented binary interactions of pathogen effectors with human proteins (bacterial human literature binary multiple (bhLit_BM-v1)) and a negative control set of random effector–human protein pairs (bacterial host random reference set (bhRRS-v1)) (Supplementary Data 12). Benchmarking our yeast-two-hybrid (Y2H) assay with these, alongside established human reference sets (hsPRS-v2 and hsRRS-v2)38, indicated an assay sensitivity of 13% and 17.5%, respectively, matching previous observations35,37,38 (Fig. 2c and Supplementary Data 13). No negative control scored positive, demonstrating the reliability of our system. Next, we assessed the biophysical quality of HuMMI using the yeast nanoluciferase-two-hybrid assay (yN2H)38 benchmarked against the four reference sets. Across thresholds, sets with bacterial proteins yielded fewer positive-scoring pairs than the human sets (Extended Data Fig. 2). As this included the negative controls and no effector toxicity was observed, prokaryotic proteins appear harder to test in this assay system, reinforcing the need for tailored reference sets. The 172 randomly selected HuMMI interactions were statistically indistinguishable from the positive control sets (Fig. 2d, Extended Data Fig. 2 and Supplementary Data 14). Thus, the biophysical quality of HuMMI is on par with well-documented literature interactions.
We aimed to demonstrate that interactions can occur within the human cell environment. We performed immunoprecipitation experiments in HEK293 cells (RRID: CVCL_0045, DSMZ) using Flag-tagged effectors and negative control Flag–GFP as baits and detecting the MYC-tagged human interaction partner by western blot. Of 32 pairs including 4 positive controls, 18 pairs and 3 controls yielded meaningful data, while 10 could not be evaluated due to unspecific binding of the human protein (3) or poor expression (7). Only one of the control pairs was positive, whereas 13 of the 18 candidate pairs yielded detectable bands specifically in the effector immunoprecipitation (Fig. 2e and Extended Data Fig. 2). Together, these results demonstrate that HuMMI contains biophysically reliable interactions that are robustly detectable in different assays and occur in human cellular environments. Importantly, functional effects may go in both directions and while in most cases effectors probably perturb the host cell, intracellular immune receptors may also recognize effectors to then initiate defence responses.
We started the functional exploration by analysing the topology of the microorganism–host interaction network (Fig. 2f,g). The degree distribution of HuMMIMAIN shows that numerous human proteins interact with multiple effectors, often from different species (Fig. 2f and Supplementary Data 11). Random sampling demonstrates highly significant effector convergence on few host interactors (Fig. 2h), a phenomenon linked to the functional importance of the targeted host proteins as shown in plant–pathogen systems13. Moreover, interactions of human proteins with effectors from four bacterial strains are highly significant and unlikely to result from random processes (Fig. 2i and Supplementary Data 11). Thus, 60 human proteins are subject to effector convergence, highlighting their potential importance for microbiome–host interactions. To explore overlap with pathogen effectors, we extracted 265 high-quality binary interactions between 217 human proteins and 80 effectors from 17 pathogenic strains from IntAct39 (Supplementary Data 15). We found a numerically low, albeit significant, number of 12 human proteins targeted by both groups (P = 0.014, Fisher's exact test, odds ratio = 2.26), of which 3 are subject to convergence by commensal effectors (P = 0.067, Fisher's exact test, odds ratio = 3.37, Supplementary Data 11). Although limited by sample size, experimental differences and the non-systematic nature of the pathogen data, these findings support both overlap and lifestyle-dependent specificity in commensal and pathogenic effector targeting40.
Many inference approaches assume that sequence similarity implies functional and interaction similarity, and such similarity could also underlie convergence. However, in the homology clusters of the systematically tested HuMMIHOM (Fig. 3a), we found that sequence and interaction similarity are only poorly correlated; instead, sequence similarity merely defines an upper limit for interaction similarity. For instance, cluster 3 contains 7 effectors sharing >90% sequence similarity, yet their interaction profile similarities range from identical to complementary (Fig. 3b,c and Supplementary Data 16). Conversely, clustering effectors unrelated in sequence and structure by their pairwise interaction similarity in HuMMIMAIN identified substantial overlap outside homology clusters (Extended Data Fig. 3), suggesting that dissimilar effectors can have similar functions in the host. Thus, host effector function as measured by protein-interaction profiles is largely independent of overall sequence similarity.
a, Schematic representation of the systematic interaction profiling of homologous effectors. b, Scatterplot of mutual sequence similarity and Jaccard interaction similarity for all effector pairs in the indicated homology groups. The union of human proteins targeted by each effector pair is indicated by node size as denoted in the legend. Individual data in Supplementary Data 16. c, Yeast growth in one representative of four repeats of all effector–human interactions tested for homology cluster 3. d, Left, proportions of human-protein targets interacting with the same bacterial effector, grouped by interface similarity on the basis of the Jaccard index (JI) of target-contacting residues, categorized as: distinct (JI ≤ 0.1), overlapping (0.1 < JI < 0.6) and same (JI ≥ 0.6). Right, Mmo_5 interacts with example human proteins via the same interface (top, 66% overlap), whereas Pfa_4 uses distinct interfaces. e, Proportions of different effectors interacting with the same human protein, grouped by interface similarity as in d. Example interface models (right) show effector binding to the same (Pfa_9, Pse_2) or distinct (Pfa_9, Yen_2) interfaces on human TCF4. f, Count of domain–motif interfaces identified in HuMMIMAIN matching at least one stringency criterion (arrow) compared to random expectation (one-sided permutation test, P = 0.0137; n = 10,000). All data related to c–f are available in Supplementary Data 17. g, Results of holdup assay and comparison with Y2H results. Indicated PDZ domains of human proteins shown on y axis were tested against 10-amino-acid C-terminal peptides of the effectors indicated on top. Calculated dissociation constant (Kd) values as indicated. Overlap between holdup (HU) and Y2H on protein level is indicated by coloured frames. Precise P values and n for each test are shown in Supplementary Data 19.
Source data
To gain structural insights and potential functional leads, we modelled effector–host protein interactions using AlphaFold-Multimer, obtaining predictions for 123 pairs (10%). For proteins with multiple interactors, we classified interfaces as ‘same' (≥60% shared contacting residues), ‘different' (<10% overlap) or ‘overlapping' (Fig. 3d,e and Extended Data Fig. 3). For instance, Mmo_5 binds to TPD52L1 and BORCS6 via the same interface, whereas Pfa_4 interacts with NOTO and LBX1 with different interfaces, possibly enabling simultaneous interactions with both (Fig. 3d and Supplementary Data 17).
Analogously, Pse_2 and Pfa_9 bind to the same interface of TCF4, whereas Yen_2 targets a different part of the protein (Fig. 3e). Identical interface binding was more frequent on human proteins than on effectors, suggesting the importance of targeting functions linked to specific domains. Mapping the binding interfaces to domain annotations strengthened this hypothesis, as even effectors binding via different interfaces may target the same domain (for example, the DNA-binding domain of LBX1). More commonly, however, effectors with different interfaces bind to distinguishable parts of the host protein. Efe_11 and Kpn_9 bind the same interface in the TRAF2 E3 ubiquitin ligase domain, whereas Pem_8 targets the C-terminal MATH domain of TRAF2, which mediates trimerization and receptor binding. Similarly, on REL, Pma_4 binds the DNA-binding and Yen_11 the dimerization domain.
Beyond large interfaces, many interactions are mediated by short linear motifs (SLiMs) in intrinsically disordered regions that bind to specific protein pocket-forming domains41. As AlphaFold often misses such interactions42, we used the orthogonal mimicINT approach to identify SLiM–domain interactions, which matches interaction pairs to known SLiM–domain templates43 (Fig. 3f). This identified putative interfaces for 54 HuMMIMAIN interactions involving bacterial host-like SLiMs binding to human domains (Supplementary Data 18), of which 51 passed at least one (Fig. 3f, P = 0.0137, exp. P value) and 22 passed two stringency criteria (Extended Data Fig. 3, P = 0.0005, exp. P value). Some of the matched motifs encompass phosphorylation sites that interact with kinases or phosphorylation-dependent binding domains such as SH2 domains. Conversely, although several commensal effectors encode predicted enzymatic domains (Supplementary Data 5), using an analogous approach we found no case in which these engage cognate substrate motifs on host proteins, and only a single effector-domain–SLiM match consistent with known docking specificity: the calcineurin-like phosphoesterase domain (PF00149) of Efe_1 and the canonical LxVP docking motif in VAC14. The largest group of 23 interactions involved PDZ domains in human proteins binding PDZ-binding motifs (PBM) in the C terminus of the bacterial interaction partners. PDZ domain-containing proteins commonly mediate functions important for microorganism–host interactions including cell–cell adhesion, protein trafficking and immune signalling44. To experimentally validate these interfaces, individual and tandem PDZ domains from 13 human proteins and C-terminal peptides from 16 interacting bacterial effectors were tested via the quantitative in vitro interaction holdup assay 45. Of 23 Y2H pairs, 16 (70%) showed at least one PDZ–peptide interaction, thus validating the mode of interaction (Fig. 3g and Supplementary Data 19). In three instances, two PDZ domains arranged in tandem were required for the interaction, suggesting that some Y2H pairs might have been missed by the holdup method due to untested combinations. As for the predicted globular interfaces, for human proteins with multiple PDZ domains, different effectors often target different domains, demonstrating specificity and functional specialization (Fig. 3g). Thus, while overall effector sequence similarity does not correlate with interaction profiles, structural modelling showed that some effectors target similar interfaces and domains, suggesting shared functions, whereas others bind distinct domains pointing to functional specialization.
We explored effector target functions using Gene Ontology (GO) enrichment (Fig. 4a, Extended Data Fig. 3 and Supplementary Data 20). Among the most enriched functions was ‘response to muramyl dipeptide (MDP)', a bacterial cell wall-derived peptide. Intriguingly, the MDP receptor, NOD2, is a major susceptibility gene for Crohn's disease46, a gut autoimmune disease with a strong aetiological microbiome contribution46. Central immune signalling pathways are also enriched, namely, the NF-κB and the stress-activated protein kinase and Jun-N-terminal kinase (SAPK/JNK) pathways. Remarkably, five significantly targeted convergence proteins belong to the NF-κB module (Extended Data Fig. 3), one of the evolutionarily oldest immune pathways in animals47. Using the Recon3D human genome-scale metabolic model48, we further found significant enrichment for metabolic enzymes among the human interactors (P = 0.0001, Fisher's exact test); however, beyond glycerophospholipid metabolism, no metabolic subsystem stood out (Supplementary Data 20). Finally, we compared commensal-targeted functions to those of pathogens (Supplementary Data 20). Some pathways were common to targets of both groups, such as ‘NF-κB signalling', whereas others are specific to commensals including ‘collagen biosynthesis' and ‘response to muramyl dipeptide'. These findings reinforce the notion of lifestyle-dependent specificity and functional overlap in the molecular interactions of commensals and pathogens with the human host.
a, Odds ratios of representative functional annotations enriched among effector-targeted human proteins (FDR < 0.05, Fisher's exact test with Bonferroni FDR correction). Terms (#) show the number of represented terms. The lowest and highest odds ratios observed for the represented group are indicated by light shaded areas of bars. Black line indicates odds ratios for shown representative terms. White triangles indicate functions also enriched in pathogen targets. b, Genetic predisposition for traits and diseases enriched among human genes encoding effector-interacting proteins in HuRI (α = 0.05, Fisher's exact test; n = 349). The odds ratio in a and b estimates the effect size of significant function/trait (two-sided Fisher's exact test FDR < 0.05) and is calculated as the odds of function-annotated/trait-associated human genes encoding effector targets to function-unannotated/trait-unassociated human genes encoding effector targets in the target set, divided by the same ratio in the HuRI set (see Methods). c, Disease groups for which genetic predisposition proteins are enriched in network neighbourhoods of effectors of the indicated strains. Trait node size corresponds to number of significantly targeted traits in that group as indicated in the legend. Thickness of strain–group edges reflects the number of underlying significant effector–trait links (α < 0.01 and odds ratio > 3, two-sided Fisher's exact test). d, Specific diseases underlying the ‘immunological' group in c. Node size reflects the number of underlying effector–trait associations as indicated in the legend. Precise P values and n for all tests are provided in Supplementary Data 23.
We wondered whether perturbations by commensal effectors could influence non-infectious human diseases, starting our analysis at the network level. Genetic variants, but also viruses, contribute to complex diseases by often subtly altering intracellular networks and disease-relevant functions. We first explored whether commensal effectors target proteins that are genetically relevant for diseases and other traits. We used ‘causal genes' identified from genome-wide-association studies (GWAS) by the Open Targets initiative49 to identify the encoded ‘disease proteins', and unified traits by the Experimental Factor Ontology (EFO)50 (Fig. 4b and Supplementary Data 21). The strong enrichment for ‘immunoglobulin isotype switching' is intriguing as the evolutionarily older IgA antibodies have important roles in shaping the gut microbiome51. Effector targets are also associated with cancers and immune diseases, such as psoriasis, asthma, allergies and systemic lupus erythematosus, although none of these predominantly affect the gut. Given the abundance of immune-related measurement traits, it is possible that the effectors systemically perturb immune signalling and thereby contribute to lung and skin diseases. Alternatively, convergence proteins such as REL or TCF4 (Fig. 2f,h) may also be targeted by local microbiota in skin or lung tissues. Supporting this, 26% of HuMMI effectors are detectable in skin microbiome samples, suggesting that commensal effectors are shared across ecological niches (Supplementary Data 22).
In addition to disease proteins being direct targets, we previously discovered that relevant genetic variation often resides in their protein interaction neighbourhood13,35. To explore these, we performed short random walks in the binary human reference interactome (HuRI)36 and defined ‘neighbourhood' as proteins visited significantly more often in HuRI than in degree-preserved randomly rewired control networks. In these neighbourhoods, we assessed disease-protein enrichment using Open Targets, aggregated nominally significant associations at the strain level, and summarized them by disease group (Fig. 4c and Supplementary Data 23). Most disease groups we found are known to be affected by the gut microbiome3. Among immune diseases, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) was enriched (nominal P = 0.0008, Fisher's exact test), particularly Crohn's disease(nominal P = 8.5 × 10−5, Fisher's exact test) but not ulcerative colitis (Fig. 4d and Supplementary Data 23). As for direct targets, neighbourhoods also harboured susceptibility for skin and lung diseases such as asthma and psoriasis. Considering the microbiota's relevance for metabolic disorders, effector targeting of neighbourhoods affecting high- and low-density lipoprotein (HDL and LDL, respectively) cholesterol levels (nominal P = 0.006 and P = 0.008, respectively, Fisher's exact test) and several diabetes-related traits is notable (Supplementary Data 23). Together, these findings suggest that commensal effectors modulate host immune signalling and the local metabolic and structural microenvironment. As the targeted proteins and neighbourhoods are genetically associated with several diseases, modulation of their functions by effectors may contribute to disease aetiology.
We sought to experimentally verify that commensal effectors perturb some of the identified pathways and functions. We focused on NF-κB signalling, which is central to many diseases and emerged repeatedly in our study. Using a dual-luciferase assay35 in HEK293 cells (RRID: CVCL_0045, DSMZ), 5 out of 26 commensal effectors significantly activated NF-κB activity in the absence of stimulation (Fig. 5a,b and Supplementary Data 24), while 3 effectors reduced NF-κB activity under strong TNF stimulation (Fig. 5b, Extended Data Fig. 4 and Supplementary Data 24). Next, we assessed whether the effectors modulate NF-κB signalling in unstimulated Caco-2 cells and after pro-inflammatory stimulation (Extended Data Fig. 4). Consistently, Cpa_12, an ABC domain-containing effector, reduced secretion of several cytokines with and without stimulation (Fig. 5c and Supplementary Data 25). Other effectors enhanced cytokine responses, particularly IL-6 and IL-8, only after Pam3CSK4 stimulation, but not after TNF or flagellin stimulation (Fig. 5d, Extended Data Fig. 4 and Supplementary Data 25). Pam3CSK4 mimics TLR1/2 activation by triacylated lipopeptides abundant in Gram-positive Bacteroidetes, while flagellin mimics TLR5 activation by Gram-negative Pseudomonadota52. Thus, commensal effectors exert complex effects on intracellular immune signalling.
a, Relative NF-κB transcription reporter activity in HEK293 cells expressing the indicated effectors at baseline conditions (no TNF) (Kruskal–Wallis test with Dunn's post hoc comparisons, *P < 0.05, **P < 0.01; n = 4 biological replicates). Boxes represent IQR, black line indicates the mean, whiskers indicate highest and lowest data point within 1.5× IQR. b, Summary of significant influence of effectors on normalized NF-κB transcriptional reporter activity at baseline conditions (−TNF) and after TNF stimulation (+TNF) (Kruskal–Wallis test with Dunn's post hoc comparisons, *P < 0.05, **P < 0.01; n = 4 biological replicates). c,d, Concentration of cytokines secreted by Caco-2 cells transfected with indicated effectors at basal conditions (unstim) or after stimulation with a proinflammatory cocktail (stim) (c) or with Pam3CSK4 (d). EV, empty vector mock control. Numbers above brackets indicate P values calculated by Kruskal–Wallis test with Dunn's post hoc comparisons; n = 3 (c) and n = 5 (d) biological replicates. Boxes represent IQR, black line indicates the mean, circles indicate individual data points. e, Radial barplot showing fold change in prevalence of 122 bacterial effectors in metagenomes of individuals with Crohn's disease (CD; n = 504 patient samples, orange) or ulcerative colitis (UC; n = 302 patient samples, purple) relative to healthy controls (n = 334 samples). Fold changes were calculated using pseudo-counts from healthy controls (Supplementary Data 26). Labels indicate effectors with significant prevalence in either Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis (FDR < 0.01, Fisher's exact test with BH correction). Black asterisks mark statistical significance for individual bars. f, Prevalence of indicated effectors in metagenomes of individuals with Crohn's disease (n = 504) and ulcerative colitis (n = 302) compared to healthy controls (FDR < 0.01, two-sided Fisher's exact test, BH correction). g, HuMMI subnetworks showing human proteins (grey) associated with Crohn's disease (orange border) or ulcerative colitis (purple border) interacting with effectors (coloured nodes) from strains enriched and depleted in patient metagenomes. Effector colours indicated in legend. Edges represent protein–protein interactions in HuMMI.
Given the genetic and functional links between commensal effectors and IBD, we wondered whether clinical data support a potential role of effectors in the disease. Hypothesizing that causal involvement in IBD aetiology may be reflected in altered effector prevalence, we analysed a metagenome study with over 800 individuals with IBD (504 Crohn's disease, 302 ulcerative colitis) and 334 healthy controls53. Focusing on effectors with physical interactions in HuMMI, 64 effectors were significantly more prevalent in individuals with Crohn's disease compared with healthy controls, whereas effectors were less common in individuals with ulcerative colitis (Fig. 5e,f and Supplementary Data 26). These opposing trends were unexpected as Pseudomonadota abundance reportedly increases in both IBDs46,54. Some hypotheses for mechanisms underlying this observation emerged from HuMMI: effectors from K. pneumonia, E. coli and E. fergusonii, all highly prevalent in Crohn's disease, interact with the Crohn's disease susceptibility protein COG6, which directly interacts with the ulcerative colitis susceptibility gene RTP5 (Fig. 5g). Similarly, Efe_13 of E. fergusonii binds the Crohn's disease susceptibility protein TNIP1, which functions in NF-κB signalling and interacts with two genes associated with ulcerative colitis. Other enriched effectors show indirect links to Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis proteins via shared interaction partners (Fig. 5g). While the mechanistic relevance of these interactions requires future studies, these direct and indirect connections to IBD disease proteins invite speculation that they may cause a homeostatic shift that increase the risk for Crohn's disease while decreasing the same for ulcerative colitis.
T3SS are traditionally viewed as hallmarks of pathogenicity, yet in plants and insects they mediate a wider range of functions including beneficial interactions55. Our findings extend this observation to the human gut, revealing that T3SS are unexpectedly common among commensal Pseudomonadota. In particular, E. coli, which resides close to the intestinal epithelium56, frequently encodes complete systems. Although not detected in commensal beta- or delta-Pseudomonadota, divergent systems may have escaped current detection tools, thus underestimating their true distribution. Functional assays validated our predictions and revealed regulatory complexity: C. pasteurii and P. massiliensis showed inconsistent T3SS activation, whereas E. tarda reliably injected effectors into human cells. Using S. Typhimurium as a heterologous host that robustly initiates the T3SS, we confirmed translocation of 32 effectors from 11 species, indicating that many commensals harbour host-directed secretion capability. The regulatory diversity of T3SS activation is consistent with the idea that, in contrast to pathogens such as S. Typhimurium, commensals may require highly specific host or environmental cues to activate secretion. Whether human epithelial or immune cells, akin to plant hosts57, can actively signal to commensals to induce T3SS, or whether secretion primarily reflects stress responses of potential pathobionts, remains an important area for future investigation.
Interpreting T3SS functionality in the human gut requires moving beyond species-level labels such as ‘commensal' or ‘pathogenic', which often obscure substantial within-species diversity. As observed in other host kingdoms58, these categories are fluid: E. coli includes both highly pathogenic lineages (for example, EPEC or EHEC) and harmless or beneficial ones, such as the probiotic E. coli Nissle 191759. In our analyses, strains isolated from apparently healthy individuals were considered commensals, whereas strains encoding known virulence effectors28, including P. aeruginosa and Salmonella spp., were designated pathogens. Importantly, between these poles lie opportunistic pathogens whose infectious potential emerges only in specific environmental or host-related conditions. A key question is therefore whether commensal T3SS primarily support opportunistic pathogenicity, or whether they have adaptive functions in the non-pathogenic lifestyle. Multiple lines of evidence from our study support the latter.
Comparative sequence, structure and host-target analyses revealed that commensal and pathogen effector repertoires are largely distinct, supporting a model in which commensal T3SS are adapted for cooperative rather than pathogenic interactions. Homotypic clustering of effector structures and depletion of mixed commensal–pathogen clusters suggest that commensal effectors follow separate selective trajectories. The domain analysis supports this, revealing many domains found only in commensal effectors possibly to support a non-pathogenic lifestyle. Notably, numerous effectors involved in cyclic diguanylate synthesis or degradation were identified, often paired with PAS sensor domains suggesting environmentally responsive functions. Intriguingly, several effectors from Gram-negative commensal Pseudomonadota potentiated Pam3CSK4-induced TLR1/2 signalling, suggesting that T3SS may modulate host responses to Gram-positive Bacteroidetes and thereby influence interphyla competition within the gut ecosystem.
Despite substantial divergence in effector structures, commensal and pathogen effectors exhibited both shared and unique host interactions within the meta-interactome. Although these comparisons are limited by the availability of hypothesis-driven interaction datasets for pathogen effectors, the observed patterns parallel findings in plant systems, where effectors from mutualists and pathogens converge on some common host targets while also interacting with proteins critical for distinct outcomes40. Across systems, convergence on a subset of host proteins emerges as a signature with biological importance13,40. These convergence proteins therefore emerge as key nodes in host–microorganism interactions and understanding their role in commensal versus pathogenic contexts is a promising entry point for understanding how pathogenicity emerges and how balanced immune responses are ensured.
The interaction–structure models provide leads for dissecting effector mechanisms. Targeted host protein domains can indicate which processes an effector may perturb and, when mediated by a corresponding motif, whether the effector may get post-translationally modified, as seen for H. pylori CagA60. Conversely, post-translational modification of host proteins is a common mechanism of pathogenicity61. A manual analysis matching the mimicINT workflow, however, revealed no clear cases in which these engage cognate host substrate motifs and only a single example consistent with known docking specificity. Whether this reflects differences between commensal and pathogen effectors, or the prevalence of functional mimicry without sequence similarity61, or merely limitations of our approach, remain to be clarified. Post-translational modification of effectors by host enzymes may either enhance effector function or act in host defence, such as by targeting foreign proteins for degradation. The latter would, however, be expected to select against motif retention. Thus, while biochemical directionality from host domain to effector SLiM is plausible, the available evidence suggests that such modifications predominantly support the lifestyle of the injecting bacterium. When commensals act as pathobionts and contribute to non-communicable diseases, such interactions may become intervention targets.
Analysis of host pathways targeted by commensal effectors indeed revealed enrichment for proteins and genetic variation implicated in immune disorders, cancers and metabolic traits. Notably, commensal effectors target network neighbourhoods associated with Crohn's disease but not ulcerative colitis, and physically and functionally interact with key members of the TNF–NF-κB signalling axis. Consistent with these molecular data, T3SS effectors were enriched in the microbiomes of individuals with Crohn's disease while being depleted in ulcerative colitis. This pattern mirrors the differential clinical response to anti-TNF therapy, which is highly effective in Crohn's disease but not in ulcerative colitis. Understanding whether and how commensal effectors directly contribute to Crohn's disease risk or flares, and whether they may even confer protection in ulcerative colitis, are compelling questions for future mechanistic studies with potential therapeutic implications.
Together, our data position host-directed secretion as an underappreciated mode of communication between the human microbiota and its host. By integrating genomic, structural, functional and systems-level analyses, we provide an initial map of the commensal T3SS meta-interactome and establish a framework for exploring its roles across microbial niches, host genotypes and disease states. These findings broaden the conceptual boundaries of T3SS biology and highlight the need to examine secretion systems not only as virulence factors but also as potential modulators of mutualism, competition and host physiology within the human gut.
Reference genomes for Pseudomonadota strains isolated by the human microbiome project from human guts and available from DSMZ (via BacDive), ATCC (atcc.org) or BEI (beiresources.org) were identified and cross-referenced with GenBank (release 229), yielding 77 matches, and subjected to T3SS identification, along with 92,143 and 9,367 MAGs, respectively, from two different meta-studies21,22 that were at least 50% complete and less than 5% contaminated. Prediction performance of EffectiveDB16 was evaluated by fivefold cross-validation with five repeats using simulated MAGs of 0–100% completeness and 0–50% contamination (in 5% steps) by random sampling genes from the test set. A performance-improved re-implementation of the EffectiveDB classifier (https://github.com/univieCUBE/phenotrex, trained on EggNOG 4.0 annotations62) was used with a positive prediction threshold of >0.7.
For 770 T3SS+, MAGs protein coding sequences for 474,871 representative proteins were identified using prodigal (v.2.6.3)63 and CD-HIT (v.4.8.1, parameters: ‘-c 1.0')64. A total of 61,115 proteins were encoded by 44 T3SS+ culture collection genomes. Three machine-learning tools (EffectiveT3 v.2.0.1, DeepT3 v.2.025 and pEffect27) were used to predict T3SS signal or effector homology. Predictions were integrated using a 0–2 scoring scheme: 2 for perfect score (pEffect >90, EffectiveT3 >0.9999, DeepT3: both classifiers positive prediction); 1 for positive prediction at default thresholds (pEffect >50, EffectiveT3 >0.95, DeepT3: one classifier); 0 for negatives. Sequences with a sum score above 4 were regarded as potential effectors. Sequences lacking start/stop codons or containing transmembrane regions (TMHMM 2.0) were excluded. Proteins were clustered using 90% sequence identity (CD-HIT parameters: ‘-c 0.9 -s 0.9') to reduce redundancy. Effector clusters with diverse effector-prediction scores were removed (full data in Supplementary Data 1 and 2).
T3SS were analogously predicted for 4,753 strains from the human gastrointestinal bacteria genome collection (HBC)17, Broad Institute–Open Biome Microbiome Library (BIO–ML) and Global Microbiome Conservancy (GMC)18,19. To obtain phylogenetic relationships for T3SS+ strains, concatenated bac120 marker proteins from GTDB-Tk (v.2.1)65 were used. T3SS+ genomes were matched to Weizmann Institute of Science representative genomes of the human gut24 with FastANI v.1.0 using average nucleotide identity (ANI) values >95% (ref. 66). The relative abundance of the 10 matching representatives was identified across 3,096 Israeli and 1,528 Dutch individuals24.
Effectors were aligned using the Needleman Wunsch algorithm and were considered ‘homologous' in HuMMIHOM using mutual sequence identity of ≥30% over 90% of the common sequence length (Supplementary Data 11).
Sequences of 1,195 known pathogenic T3 effectors were obtained from BastionHub28 (29 August 2022), and sequence similarity between commensal and pathogenic effector sequences was assessed using BLAST (v.2.10)67. For each commensal effector, the pathogen effector with the highest sequence similarity was considered as the best match and used to calculate alignment coverage. Additional significant similarities were identified using iterative sequence searches against ~124 M non-redundant bacterial sequences from UniRef90 (January 2024) with Jackhmmer29. For each commensal effector, we ran five iterations using inclusion and comparison E-value thresholds of <10−5 (Supplementary Data 5).
Protein domain annotation for effectors was carried out using the standalone version of InterProScan (v.5.75-106.0), using Pfam v.37.4 as reference. Amino acid sequences in FASTA format were used as input across three datasets: effector proteins from commensal bacterial strains (n = 3,002) and MAGs (n = 186), human and vertebrate pathogen effectors obtained from BastionHub, and all reviewed human proteins from the UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot reference proteome. Pathogen effectors were classified on the basis of the host annotation (human, vertebrate) of the corresponding species or strain, as provided by PHI-base68 and BV-BRC69. InterProScan used (translated) protein sequences (Supplementary Data 4) with default parameters. Domain hits with an E-value < 10−5 were considered significant.
Domains identified as significant in commensal effectors were used as reference for comparative analysis and evaluated for their presence in pathogen effectors and human proteins, applying the same annotation criteria and significance threshold. All domain annotation results, including individual hits across datasets and the comparative summary, are provided in Supplementary Data 5.
Structures of pathogen and commensal effectors were compared using FoldSeek70. Effector structures were downloaded from the AlphaFold DB when available; otherwise, a model with >95% sequence identity and >90% sequence coverage was selected as representative. Clustering was performed by setting bidirectional query coverages (qcov) at 0.5, 0.7 and 0.9, and E-value thresholds at 0.001, 0.01 and 1 using FoldSeek Cluster's greedy set cover algorithm. To assess the statistical significance of the obtained cluster distributions, we performed label permutation tests (n = 10,000) while keeping the graph's topology intact. The clustering analysis was run for all commensals against three sets of pathogen effectors: all pathogens (895 structures from human, vertebrate and plant pathogens), human and vertebrate pathogens (536 structures) and human pathogen effectors only (488 structures) (Supplementary Data 6).
For PCR cloning, genomic DNA or bacterial stocks were obtained from culture collections: ATCC (via LGC Standards, Wesel, Germany, or ATCC, Manassas, VA, USA), DSMZ (Leibniz Institute DSMZ, Braunschweig, Germany) and BEI resources (Manassas, VA, USA) (Supplementary Data 9). Live strains were cultured according to supplier protocols and DNA was extracted using the NucleosSpin Plasmid mini kit. Effectors were cloned into pENTR223.1 by nested PCR to add Sfi sites and by restriction enzyme-based cloning using standard protocols, and verified by Sanger sequencing. Effectors identified from MAGs and effectors for the PRS were synthesized by Twist Bioscience. For experiments, effectors were moved into pDEST-DB (pPC97, Cen origin), the pDEST-N2H-N1 and -N2 and pMH-Flag-HA by Gateway LR reactions.
For bacterial injection assays, effector ORFs were cloned into a modified bacterial expression plasmid based on the pEYFP backbone (BD Biosciences, 6004-1). The EYFP sequence (positions 217–1,407) was removed and replaced with (1) SfiI and XbaI restriction sites for directional cloning of effector ORFs, (2) a 3× Flag epitope tag, (3) the HiBiT tag coding sequence VSGWRLFKKIS (Promega), and (4) the E. coli rrnB transcriptional terminator (pLac_FL_HiBiT). PCR-amplified effectors were ligated into pLac_FL_HiBiT at SfiI and XbaI restriction sites (primers in Supplementary Data 7). The positive control SipA was amplified from a pT10-based plasmid (pMIB6433)34. Cloning was verified by analytical PCR.
Electrocompetent S. enterica sv. Typhimurium (wild-type SB300 and ΔsctV mutant SB1751)34, E. tarda (ATCC 23685), C. pasteurii (DSM 28879) and P. massiliensis (DSM 26120) were generated in-house and electroporated with effector encoding plasmids using a Gene Pulser Xcell Electroporation System (Bio-Rad) at 2.5 kV and 200 Ω for ~5 ms. Transformed strains were cultured overnight in LB medium with ampicillin for subsequent use in injection assays.
The injection assay was adapted from ref. 34. HeLa cells stably expressing LgBiT (HeLa-LgBiT) were grown using standard conditions (DMEM, 10% fetal bovine serum (FBS), 37 °C, 5% CO2) for 24 h before infection. S. Typhimurium strains carrying pLac_FL_HiBiT effector constructs were cultured overnight in LB supplemented with 0.3 M NaCl and ampicillin. Edwardsiella tarda, C. pasteurii and P. massiliensis strains were cultured with 200 μM IPTG to induce effector expression. Overnight bacterial cultures were added to the HeLa-LgBiT cells at a multiplicity of infection of 50 and jointly incubated for 1 h (Salmonella) or 1.5 h. After media replacement, extracellular luminescence was quenched by addition of 1× DarkBiT peptide (Promega, CS3002A02) for 50 min. Luminescence was measured after addition of 25 μl fresh Nano-Glo reagent (Promega, N2012) using a SpectraMax ID3 microplate reader (1,000 ms). Each strain was tested with four technical replicates and five biological replicates performed on separate days. Luminescence values from technical replicates were averaged to obtain a single value for each biological replicate. Luminescence fold-change was calculated by dividing the average signal from the effector-expressing strain by that of the mock control separately for wild-type and ΔsctV strains. To assess effector translocation, fold-change values were statistically compared between wild-type and mutant strains for Salmonella and against the negative control (SipA in ΔsctV) for E. tarda, using Wilcoxon rank-sum test (Supplementary Data 10).
Proteins were separated by 10% or 15% SDS–PAGE, transferred to PVDF membranes (Bio-Rad, 1620177) and blocked in blocking solution (5% non-fat dry milk in 1× PBS) for 1 h at room temperature or overnight at 4 °C. Blots were done with mouse anti-Flag M2 monoclonal antibody (Sigma-Aldrich, F1804, 1:5,000), rabbit anti-Myc (Abcam, ab9106, 1:1,000), followed by HRP-conjugated secondary antibody (Santa Cruz Biotechnology; anti-mouse: sc-516102; anti-rabbit: sc-2357, both 1:5,000) for 1 h each with three washes with blocking solution or PBST, respectively. Signal was detected with SuperSignal West Femto Substrate (Thermo Scientific, 34094) according to manufacturer instructions. Blots were imaged using the Intas ChemoStar imaging system.
A multi-assay interactome mapping pipeline was used37 (Extended Data Fig. 2). In the initial screening by Y2H, candidate effectors fused to the Gal4 DNA-binding domain (DB-X) were screened against 17,472 human proteins fused to the Gal4 activation domain (AD-Y). Before screening, DB-X ORFs were tested for autoactivation by mating against AD-empty plasmids. Autoactivators were excluded. In the primary screen, DB-X strains in Y8930 (MATα) were mated on yeast extract peptone dextrose (YEPD) agar (1%) plates against minipools of ~188 AD-Y in Y8800 (MATa) representing the human ORFeome collection (v.9.1)36. After 24 h, yeasts were replica-plated onto selective media lacking leucine, tryptophan and histidine (SC-Leu-Trp-His), containing 1 mM 3-AT (3-amino-1,2,4-triazole) (3-AT plates) and replica-cleaned after 24 h. After 48 h, colonies were picked and then grown for 72 h in SC-Leu-Trp liquid medium for secondary phenotyping using the same selective +SC-Leu-His + 1 mM 3-AT + 1 mg l−1 cycloheximide plates to identify spontaneous autoactivators. Clones growing on 3-AT plates but not on cycloheximide plates were processed for sequence identification using a modified Kilo-seq procedure35: ORFs were amplified and tagged by PCR using a universal ‘term' reverse primer (5'-GGAGACTTGACCAAACCTCTGGC) and Gal4-AD and -DB specific forward primers with position barcodes (Supplementary Table 11) and a TruSeq P7 sequence (0.2 µl DreamTaq DNA polymerase (ThermoFisher, EP0702), 3 µl 2 µM term primer, 3 µl forward primer, 2 µl yeast lysis). For every 96-well plate, 5 µl from each well were pooled, purified with 24 µl magnetic beads (magtivio, MDKT00010075) and eluted in 25 µl TE buffer. The DNA concentration of each pool was quantified by the QuantiT PicoGreen dsDNA Assay kit (ThermoFisher, P7589) using a lambda DNA dilution series (50–0.390625 ng μl−1), then diluted to 1–2 ng μl−1 and tagmented with 0.25 µl TDE enzyme (Illumina Tagment DNA TDE1 Enzyme and Buffer kit, 20034197). A second PCR added plate-specific Nextera i5/i7 indices (Supplementary Table 11) (8 µl tagmented DNA, 0.2 µl DreamTaq (ThermoFisher, EP0702), 1 µl 10 µM i5/i7 primers), followed by bead cleanup (80 µl beads per 100 µl PCR, eluted in 30 µl). Libraries were sequenced on a MiSeq v.2 kit (Illumina, MS-102-2002) and demultiplexed with bcl2fastq2 (v.2.20.0.422) by Illumina.
Finally, haploid yeasts of the DB-X and AD-Y candidate interaction pairs were mated individually and tested four times on selective plates using empty AD and DB plasmids as negative controls. Growth scoring was performed using a custom dilated convolutional neural network35. Pairs scoring positive in at least three out of four repeats qualified as bona fide Y2H interactors. The AD-Y and DB-X constructs were again identified by Illumina sequencing. All interaction data are provided in Supplementary Data 11.
To identify reliably documented interactions between bacterial effectors and human proteins for our control set, we queried the IMEx consortium protein interaction databases71 for pairs supported by multiple evidence and at least one experiment detecting direct interactions. We manually recurated the corresponding publications and identified 67 well-documented direct interactions between 29 T3 effectors and 64 human proteins, described in 38 distinct publications constituting bhLit_BM-v1. To assemble bhRRS-v1, we randomly paired T3 effectors from bhLit_BM-v1 with human proteins in HuRI (Supplementary Data 12). Effector ORFs were cloned into Entry and experimental plasmids as described above. Human hsPRS/RRS-v2 ORFs were taken from hORFeome9.1 (ref. 36) and verified by end-read Sanger sequencing.
yN2H was used to independently validate the quality of the HuMMI dataset38. A total of 200 interaction pairs were randomly picked from HuMMI; all ORFs (Supplementary Data 14) were transferred by Gateway LR reactions into pDEST-N2H-N1 and pDEST-N2H-N2, and transformed into haploid Saccharomyces cerevisiae Y8800 (MATa) and Y8930 (MATα) strains. Protein pairs from all datasets were randomly distributed across matching 96-well plates. Luminescence from reconstituted NanoLuc for each sample was measured on a SpectraMax ID3 (Molecular Devices) with a 2-s integration time. The normalized luminescence ratio (NLR) was calculated by dividing the raw luminescence of each pair (N1-X N2-Y) by the maximum luminescence value of one of the two background measurements. All obtained NLR values were log2 transformed and the positive fraction for each dataset was determined at log2 NLR thresholds between –2 and 2, in 0.01 increments. Statistical results were robust across a wide range of stringency thresholds. Supplementary Data 14 reports the results at log2NLR = 0. Reported P values were calculated by Fisher's exact test.
We evaluated whether N-terminally Flag-HA-tagged effector, or negative control Flag-GFP, co-immunoprecipitated the human proteins carrying an N-terminal MYC tag. Transfections for test and control pairs were always processed in parallel. HEK293 cells (RRID: CVCL_0045, DSMZ) were seeded in 10-cm dishes at a density yielding 60–70% confluency on the day of transfection. Plasmid DNA and X-tremeGENE transfection reagent (Roche) were mixed at a ratio of 1:2 (µg DNA:µl reagent) in serum-free DMEM. Per dish, 10 µg plasmid DNA (consisting of 3 µg effector- or GFP-encoding plasmid, 3 µg plasmid encoding the human protein and 4 µg empty vector) was diluted in 500 µl serum-free medium, followed by the addition of 20 µl X-tremeGENE reagent. The mixture was inverted twice, incubated for 15 min at room temperature and then added dropwise to the culture dish containing cells in complete growth medium. Cells were incubated under standard culture conditions (37 °C, 5% CO2) for 24 h before downstream analysis.
For cell lysate preparation, all steps were performed on ice. Culture medium was aspirated, and cells were washed three times with ice-cold 1× PBS by rinsing and aspirating sequentially. Cells were lysed directly on the plate by adding 1 ml NP-40 lysis buffer per plate (50 mM Tris-HCl, pH 8.0, 150 mM NaCl, 1% (v/v) NP-40 and 2.5 mM EDTA, with Roche complete protease inhibitor). Cells were detached using a rubber policeman and transferred to a 1-ml centrifuge tube. Lysates were incubated on ice for 30 min and cleared by centrifugation at 30,000g for 15 min at 4 °C. The supernatant was collected and the protein concentration was measured using the Bradford assay (Bio-Rad); the lysate was immediately used.
For immunoprecipitation experiments, 1 mg of cleared lysates of each sample was diluted into a final volume of 750 µl, and then 50 µl of an NP-40 buffer equilibrated with 20% anti-Flag M2 affinity gel (Sigma-Aldrich, A2220) slurry was added. Samples were rotated at 4 °C for 1 h. For washing, the tube was centrifuged at maximum speed for 30 s, the supernatant aspirated and 1 ml NP-40 wash buffer added, followed by a brief inversion. After three washes, the beads were resuspended in 50 µl NP-40 buffer, 50 µl Laemmli loading buffer was added, and the beads were heated at 98 °C for 10 min and briefly centrifuged before analysis. For analysis, 10 µl of cleared lysates and 15 µl of all immunoprecipitates were loaded on SDS–PAGE and processed through western blots as described above.
The completeness of an interactome map is an important parameter that enables assessment of overlap and how complete a given biology is covered by the map. The framework incorporates assay sensitivity (that is, the proportion of interactions the assay can detect), sampling sensitivity (that is, saturation of the screen) and search space, describing all pairwise protein combinations. For the meta-interactome studied here, the search space cannot reasonably be estimated due to the uncertainty of T3SS-containing microorganisms in all human guts and the resulting inability to define that dimension of the problem.
Assay sensitivity (Sa) was assessed using the effector bh_LitBM-v1 (54 pairs) and bhRRS-v1 (72 pairs) as well as the human hsPRS/RRS-v2 (60 and 78 pairs, respectively) for benchmarking. All reference sets were tested four times using the Y2H screening pipeline (Supplementary Data 13). To assess sampling sensitivity (Ss), a repeat screen was conducted. A total of 288 bacterial effectors were screened 4 times against 5 pools comprising 1,475 human proteins. A saturation curve was calculated as described37. In brief, all combinations of the number of interactions of the four repeats were assembled and the reciprocal values calculated. From these, a linear regression was determined to obtain the slope and the intercept. Reciprocal parameters were calculated and the Michaelis Menten equation was used with modified variables: analogous to increasing substrate concentrations in enzyme reactions, repeat screens progressively drive the screen to saturation91. Hence a saturation curve was predicted using Ni(R) = Nimax × R/Km + R, with Ni representing the interaction count after R repeats, Nimax the saturation limit and Km the Michaelis constant. Overall sensitivity emerges from both sampling and assay limitations and was calculated as So = Sa × Ss.
To estimate the significance of effector convergence, we performed a permutation test by randomly sampling with replacement 979 target nodes from HuRI36 (n = 8,274). In each iteration, we counted the number of unique targets, and the distribution from 10,000 random permutations was used to compute the z-score for the observed 349 targets. A P value was obtained from the z-scores using the ‘pnorm()' R command and multiplied by 2 for a two-tailed test. To avoid overestimation and increase stringency, we restricted the analysis to Y2H positive proteins in HuMMIMAIN and HuRI. To assess interspecies convergence, we used a conditional permutation test that preserves the strain contribution. Each iteration generated 18 samples corresponding to the observed number of targets for each strain (Supplementary Data 11). For every protein, the frequency of selection across all strains was recorded as its convergence value. On the basis of 10,000 iterations, we derived the convergence value distribution, calculated z-scores and obtained the P value using the pnorm() R function. Significance was observed from four strains onward (P < 0.004), and proteins targeted by at least four strains were considered to show interspecies convergence.
To investigate the relationship between the effector sequence and the interaction profile similarity, we calculated the pairwise Jaccard indices for all effector pairs within each homology cluster. The index was defined as the ratio of shared to total human targets. Pairs with fewer than three targets were excluded.
To analyse the interfaces of effector–host interaction pairs, all identified pairs were subjected to structural prediction using AlphaFold v.2.3.1 with the following options: –model_preset=multimer, –db_preset=full_dbs, –max_template_date=2023-12-19, –num_multimer_predictions_per_model=1, –enable_cpu_relax and –use_precomputed_msas. Predictions were not generated for pairs whose combined length exceeded 2,500 residues. The predicted aligned error (PAE) matrix was extracted from the AlphaFold pickle output using alphapickle v.1.4.1 (https://github.com/mattarnoldbio/alphapickle, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5752375). To assess confidence, we used the confident contacts count (CCC), which is the number of residue–residue contacts72 with PAE < 4 Å. Each putative interface residue was assigned a PAE value. When a residue was in contact with multiple residues on the partner protein, the minimum PAE value among those contacts was used. Structure predictions were considered confident when the CCC was ≥5.
Protein sequences (Supplementary Data 17) were converted from single-letter aa notation to three-letter residue annotation, and residue identifiers were assigned to match their positions in the AlphaFold PAE matrix. Only human proteins targeted by at least two bacterial effectors were retained. Residue contacts were extracted and matched to PAE coordinates, and pooled PAE values defined the 25th, 50th, 75th and 95th percentile thresholds. Contacts with PAE values equal or below the threshold were retained, and the corresponding human and bacterial residues and total retained contacts were recorded. This procedure was repeated for the 25th, 50th, 75th and 95th percentiles, and the resulting subsets were merged into the main dataset.
Interface similarity between bacterial effectors targeting the same human protein was assessed using the Jaccard index across all PAE thresholds. For each targeted human protein, all interacting bacterial effectors were identified, and all possible effector–effector combinations were generated. At each threshold, the Jaccard index was calculated as the number of overlapping human interface residues divided by the total number of unique residues in both interfaces. Indices were classified as distinct (Jaccard index ≤ 0.1), overlapping (0.1 < Jaccard index < 0.6) or same (Jaccard index ≥ 0.6). Analogous calculations were performed to analyse interfaces of human proteins targeted by the same bacterial effector.
Domains were assigned to the interacting human proteins using InterProScan v.5.75 with InterPro release 106.0, run through the EBI web server. Domain coordinates, descriptions and confidence scores were retrieved. The number of interface residues within each domain boundary (n_interface_residues_in_domain) was then counted, along with the total residues in the predicted interface (n_residues_in_interface), the percentage of interface residues in the domain (IF%), the number of residues in the domain (Domain_length) and the proportion of the domain length relative to the full protein length (Domain%).
We used as mimicINT43 input, a representative set of effectors identified in isolated strains (2,300 sequences clustered at 90% identity) and all effectors identified in MAGs (186). mimicINT detects domains in effector sequences using the signatures from the InterPro v.81.0 database73, retaining matches with an E-value < 10−5. For motif detection, mimicINT uses definitions available in the ELM database74. The IUPred 1.0 algorithm75 was employed to detect motifs in disordered regions with both short and long models (motif disorder propensity = 0.2 (ref. 76), minimum size = 5). The interface inference step used the 3did database77 for domain–domain templates and the ELM database (2022 release) for motif–domain templates. Two scoring strategies were applied. First, domain binding specificity within the same family was accounted for by computing a profile HMM-based domain score41 (stringency threshold = 0.3). Second, given the degenerate nature of motifs41, mimicINT uses Monte Carlo simulations to estimate the probability of a SLiM occurring by chance, by shuffling disordered regions of the input sequences to generate N randomized proteins. Effectors were first grouped by strain, with MAG-derived effectors assigned to the closest strain. Disordered regions were shuffled 100,000 times using two backgrounds: same-strain effectors (within-strain shuffling) and full effector set (interstrain shuffling). Motif occurrences in each effector were compared to those in the shuffled sequences, retaining only those with an empirical P < 0.1 in both backgrounds. To assess whether the number of inferred interface-resolved interactions exceeded random expectation, the analysis was controlled using 10,000 degree-controlled random networks generated from the human interaction search space (Supplementary Data 18).
For the reverse analysis of bacterial domains interacting with SLiMs in the human proteins, the annotated bacterial domains were matched to domains in the ELM templates. For interactors of the so-identified effectors (Efe_1, Pfa_18, Pre_16, Pst_8, Vfu_32), we identified disordered regions as above and screened these for motifs matching the templates in the ELM database, yielding the reported example.
Holdup is a biochemical assay used to validate the interface predictions involving PDZ domains. A total of 54 human PDZ domains and 11 tandem constructs were recombinantly expressed as His6-MBP-PDZ constructs in E. coli BL21(DE3) pLysS and purified by Ni2+-affinity columns using 800 µl of beads (Chelating Sepharose Fast Flow immobilized metal affinity chromatography, Cytiva) per target. After elution, purified proteins were desalted using PD10 columns (GE healthcare, 17085101) into 3.5 ml 50 mM Tris (pH 8.0), 300 mM NaCl and 10 mM imidazole buffer. Protein concentrations were determined using A280 nm on a PHERAstar FSX plate reader (BMG LABTECH), and purity assessed by SDS–PAGE and capillary electrophoresis; 4 µM stocks were stored at −20 °C. Biotinylated peptides (10-mer) corresponding to the C-terminal sequences of effectors were synthesized by GenicBio Limited; the N-terminal biotin was attached via a 6-aminohexanoic acid linker, and all peptides were >95% pure (HPLC and MS). Peptides were solubilized in dH2O, 1.4% ammonia or 5% acetic acid, aliquoted at 10 mM and stored at −20 °C.
For the assay, 2.5 µl of streptavidin resin (Cytiva, 17511301) was incubated in a 384-well filter plate (Millipore, MZHVN0W10) for 15 min with 20 µl of a 42 µM peptide solution. The resin was washed with 10 resin volumes (resvol) of holdup buffer (50 mM Tris-HCl, 300 mM NaCl, pH 8.0, 10 mM imidazole, 5 mM dithiothreitol), incubated for 15 min with 5 resvol 1 mM biotin and washed three times with 10 resvol of holdup buffer. Individual PDZ domains were added to wells, incubated for 15 min, and unbound PDZ recovered by centrifugation into 384-well black assay plates for fluorescence readout. Concentrations were quantified by intrinsic Trp fluorescence, and fluorescein/mCherry was used for peak normalization. Binding affinities and equilibrium dissociation constants were calculated as previously described45, using the mean PBM concentration. Raw values and statistical analysis are provided in Supplementary Data 19.
Functional enrichment of effector targets was assessed using the ‘gost()' function in the ‘gprofiler2' R package (v.0.2.1)78 with HuRI as the background (custom_bg), excluding electronic annotations (exclude_iea = TRUE), with Benjamini–Hochberg correction (correction_method = ‘fdr'). Functional categories were drawn from Gene Ontology biological process terms (GO:BP), Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathways, and the Reactome pathways database (sources = c(‘GO:BP', ‘KEGG', ‘ REAC')). Odds ratios and fold enrichments were calculated to estimate effect sizes, where the odds ratios was the ratio of odds in the target set to those in the HuRI background, and fold enrichment compared observed to expected annotated targets. Expected values were based on random sampling from the HuRI background (GO:BP = 6,988; KEGG = 3,250; Reactome = 4,592) (Supplementary Data 20). Similar analyses were performed for functional enrichment analysis of human proteins targeted by pathogens (Supplementary Data 20).
We assessed enrichment of targeted enzymes across metabolic subsystems using the human genome-scale model Recon3D48. Recon3D is a curated static model of human metabolism that lacks post-translational and allosteric regulation. Ligases and kinases were excluded to focus on metabolic enzymes. For each of the 95 Recon3D subsystems, enrichment was tested using the ‘phyper()' R function, with inputs corresponding to annotated and unannotated targeted enzymes and BH false discovery rate (FDR) correction. OR and fold enrichment were calculated as described for functional analyses (Supplementary Data 20).
Associations of effector targets and convergence proteins with human disease genetics were tested using a two-sided Fisher's exact test. Disease-causal genes were obtained from the Open Targets genetic portal (access date 23 August 2022), which integrates variant-to-gene distance, quantitative trait loci co-localization, chromatin interactions and variant pathogenicity79. The portal's machine-learning model assigns each locus-to-gene (L2G) score to genes in loci identified in GWAS to identify the most probable causal gene. Genes with L2G ≥ 0.5 were considered causal as recommended80. Ensembl identifiers were converted to gene symbols using the biomaRt R package (v.2.60.1, Bioconductor 3.19), and Fisher's exact test was implemented in R (fisher.test), stats v.4.2.2 using default parameters on 2 × 2 contingency tables comparing causal gene presence in query and background sets. HuRI protein encoding genes were used as the background, and targets or convergence proteins as the query sets. FDR correction and OR and fold enrichments were calculated as done for functional enrichment (Supplementary Data 21).
We implemented a random walk with restart (RWR) algorithm, RWR-MH81, to explore the network neighbourhood of 338 human proteins targeted by 243 commensal effectors in HuRI36 (HuMMIMAIN). Human targets were used as seeds, with the restart probability of 0.7 generating a ranked list of proteins. Statistical significance was assessed by random walks in degree-preserved randomized networks. We generated 1,000 random networks from HuRI and computed RWR scores for each protein, retaining as network neighbour only those with empirical P < 0.01.
For each set of significant neighbourhood proteins, we tested for enrichment of Open Targets causal genes (L2G ≥ 0.5) linked to traits supported by at least three causal genes. Enrichment in each strain neighbourhood was assessed using two-sided Fisher's exact test with BH correction. No associations were significant (FDR < 0.05). We therefore focused on 400 associations with nominal P < 0.01 and odds ratio > 3. Disease categorizations were refined to reflect aetiology; Sjogren syndrome, eczema and psoriasis were grouped as immunological rather than eye or skin traits, and osteoarthritis as musculoskeletal/connective tissue rather than metabolic traits. For Fig. 4d, related asthma and psoriasis terms were merged (Supplementary Data 23).
HEK293 cells (RRID: CVCL_0045, DSMZ) were maintained in DMEM, 10% FBS, 100 U ml−1 penicillin–streptomycin at 37 °C and 5% CO2. IKKβ (pRK5-Flag) and A20 (pEF4-Flag) served as positive and negative controls, respectively. Cells (1 × 106 per 60 mm dish) were transfected with 10 ng NF-κB reporter plasmid (6× NF-κB firefly luciferase pGL2), 50 ng pTK reporter (Renilla luciferase) and 2 µg bacterial ORF in pMH-Flag-HA using the calcium phosphate method. After 6 h, medium was replaced. To assess NF-κB inhibition, cells were treated for 4 h with 20 ng ml−1 TNF (Sigma-Aldrich, SRP3177) at 24 h post transfection. Lysates were analysed using the dual-luciferase reporter kit (Promega, E1980) with a luminometer (Berthold Centro LB960 microplate reader, software: MikroWin 2010). NF-κB induction was determined as firefly/Renilla luminescence. P values were calculated using Kruskal–Wallis test with Dunn's post hoc comparisons followed by FDR correction. Raw values and statistical analysis are provided in Supplementary Data 24.
Protein expression was analysed by western blot as described above with following modifications: blocking solution contained 0.1% Tween-20. Membranes were incubated overnight at 4 °C with primary antibodies in 2.5% BSA in PBST, washed and probed with anti-mouse secondary antibody in PBST for 1 h at room temperature (1:10,000; Jackson ImmunoResearch Labs, RRID:AB_2340770). Primary antibodies used were: anti-β-actin (1:10,000; Santa Cruz Biotechnology, RRID:AB_626632), anti-Flag M2 (1:500; Sigma-Aldrich, RRID:AB_259529) and anti-HA (1:1,000; Sigma-Aldrich, RRID:AB_514505). Signals were detected using LumiGlo reagent (CST, 7003S) and chemiluminescence film (Sigma-Aldrich, GE28-9068-36).
Caco-2 cells (RRID: CVCL_0025) were maintained in DMEM glutamax medium (Gibco) with 10% FBS and 1% Pen/Strep at 37 °C and 5% CO2. Experiments in Fig. 5c were performed by transfecting Caco-2 cells using 40,000 MW linear polyethylenimine (PEI MAX) (Polysciences) at a ratio of 1:5 pDNA:PEI. Cells were exposed to the transfection mixture for 16 h, washed, recovered for 6 h and then sorted (BD FACSAria III cell sorter, BD Biosciences). After 24 h recovery, cells were activated for 48 h using a stimulation mix containing 200 ng ml−1 phorbol-12-myristate-13-acetate (P8139, Sigma-Aldrich), 100 ng ml−1 lipopolysaccharide (L6529, Sigma-Aldrich) and 100 ng ml−1 TNF (130-094-014, Miltenyi Biotec). During activation, proliferation was monitored in the Incucyte S3 Live Cell Analysis system (Essen BioScience). Cytokine levels were determined using the human inflammation panel 1 LEGENDplex kit (Biolegend). We performed three biological repeats, each with three or four technical repeats. Statistical significance was tested on the average of the technical replicates using Kruskal–Wallis test with Dunn's post hoc comparisons. Experiments in Fig. 5d and Extended Data Fig. 4d were performed by transfecting cells using the 4D-Nucleofector system (Lonza). Collected cells were resuspended in SF nucleofector solution, added with 0.6 µg plasmid, and pulsed (code DG-113) and plated in DMEM + 5% FBS. Cells were allowed to recover overnight and then rested in culture medium for 24 h. Cells were stimulated with 10 µg ml−1 Pam3CSK4 (tlrl-pms, Invivogen), 1 µg ml−1 flagellin (tlrl-stfla, Invivogen) or 100 ng ml−1 TNF (130-094-014, Miltenyi Biotec) for 24 h. We performed five biological repeat experiments with three technical repeats each. For each experiment, pooled supernatants were analysed using the Human Anti-virus Response Panel V02 (BioLegend). The data were analysed using Kruskal–Wallis test with Dunn's post hoc comparisons. Raw and statistical summary data are available in Supplementary Data 25.
Metagenomic assemblies from the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Multiomics DataBases (IBDMBD)53 and from the skin metagenome82 were downloaded, and protein repertoires predicted using Prodigal (option: -p meta)83. Effectors were compared to the metagenomic protein repertoires using DIAMOND 0.9.24 (options: >90% query length, >80% identity). For analyses in Fig. 5, samples were grouped into individuals with ulcerative colitis (n = 304), Crohn's disease (n = 508) and the controls without IBD (n = 334). Binary presence and absence vectors for each effector across the sample were generated and the prevalence of each effector in patients compared to the controls was assessed using Fisher's exact test, implemented within the SciPy 1.9.3 Python 3.10.12 module, and FDR corrected using BH correction. Differences in prevalence distributions between healthy and either patient cohort were estimated using the Wilcoxon rank-sum test, implemented in the ‘wilcox.test()' R function. We used fold change as the measure of effect size in Fig. 5e, calculated as prevalence in the test group divided by prevalence in the healthy group. To avoid division by zero, we applied a small pseudo-count to the healthy cohort data for individuals with 0% prevalence. The pseudo-count was equivalent to half a case in the healthy cohort (n = 334 individuals), ensuring minimal influence on results while enabling calculation of fold change. Statistical details are provided in Supplementary Data 26.
Data were subjected to statistical analysis and plotted in Microsoft Excel 2010 or Python or R scripts. For comparison of normally distributed values, we used one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA). For comparison of values not passing the normality tests, we used either Kruskal–Wallis test with Dunn's correction for multiple-group comparisons or Wilcoxon rank-sum test for two-group comparisons as indicated. Enrichments were calculated using Fisher's exact test with Bonferroni FDR correction. All statistical evaluations were done as two-sided tests. Generally, a corrected P < 0.05 was considered significant. GO, KEGG and Reactome functional enrichments were calculated using the gprofiler2 R package with the indicated background sets. For the disease target enrichments and neighbourhood associations, no associations were significant after multiple hypothesis correction, which is why nominally significant associations calculated by Fisher's exact tests were used for Fig. 4c,d. All raw values, n and statistical details are presented in Supplementary Data as indicated in figure legends and in Methods.
Further information on research design is available in the Nature Portfolio Reporting Summary linked to this article.
All sequence, interaction and functional data generated in this study are available as supplementary information. The effectors identified and cloned for interactome mapping are presented in Supplementary Data 7. All protein–protein interaction data acquired in this study can be found in Supplementary Data 11. The data for functional validation assays can be found in Supplementary Data 24–26. All protein interaction data have been deposited to the IMEx consortium (http://www.imexconsortium.org) through IntAct and assigned the identifier IM-29849. New effector sequences have been submitted to GenBank: BankIt2727690: OR372873–OR373035 and OR509516–OR509528. Source data are provided with this paper.
Data and scripts related to the prediction of T3SS-positive reference strains and metagenomes are available on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17825584 (ref. 84). All data and scripts generated to perform the structural comparison between commensal and pathogen effectors are available on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11951539 (ref. 85). The full set of inferred SLiM–domain and domain–domain interactions and the randomly generated networks are available on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11400863 (ref. 86). The mimicINT43 code can be found on GitHub at https://github.com/TAGC-NetworkBiology/mimicINT/releases/tag/v1 (ref. 87). The 1,000 randomized control networks for the random walk analysis are available on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12743976 (ref. 88). The AlphaFold predictions of effector–host interaction pairs along with all confidently predicted structures are available on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16816224 (ref. 89). The datasets and analysis scripts for convergence analysis, functional and disease enrichment analysis, and AlphaFold human–effector interface similarity analysis are available on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16883544 (ref. 90).
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This work was supported by HDHL-INTIMIC ‘Interrelation of the Intestinal Microbiome, Diet and Health' (BMBF 01EA1803 to P.F.-B., ANR ANR-17-HDIM-0001 to C.B. and FFG 11819559 to T.R.), the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (Project ID 101003633, RiPCoN; P.F.-B., C.B.); the Free State of Bavaria's AI for Therapy (AI4T) Initiative through the Institute of AI for Drug Discovery (AID) (P.F.-B.), the French government under the France 2030 investment plan, as part of the initiative d'Excellence d'Aix-Marseille Université – A*MIDEX (AMX-21-PEP-043, to A.Z.), and the FRS-FNRS (J.-C.T. and S.B.M.). The computational results presented were achieved in part using the Vienna Scientific Cluster (VSC). Centre de Calcul Intensif d'Aix-Marseille is acknowledged for granting access to its high-performance computing resources. S.A.C. received funding from the ‘Espoirs de la recherche' programme managed by the French Fondation pour la Recherche Médicale (FRM, FDT202106013072). The project leading to this publication also received funding from France 2030, the French Government programme managed by the French National Research Agency (ANR-16-CONV-0001) and from the Excellence Initiative of Aix-Marseille University – AMIDEX. J.F.-M. was funded by Consejo Nacional de Humanidades Ciencias y Tecnologias (CONAHCYT) Becas al Extranjero Convenios GOBIERNO FRANCES 2021 – 1 grant 795494, and received support from the ‘Espoirs de la Recherche' programme managed by the French Fondation pour la Recherche Medicale (FRM, FDT202404018637). The AFMB contribution was supported by the French Infrastructure for Integrated Structural Biology (FRISBI) ANR-10-INSB-05-01. D. Krappmann was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (ID 210592381 – SFB 1054 A04). T.C. was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (project 403224013 – SFB 1382 Q02). S.R. was supported by an ERS Long-Term Research Fellowship (LTRF2024-01131).
Open access funding provided by Helmholtz Zentrum München - Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Gesundheit und Umwelt (GmbH).
Deeya Saha
Present address: Department of Biotechnology, Faculty of Life and Allied Health Sciences, Ramaiah University of Applied Sciences, Bangalore, India
These authors contributed equally: Veronika Young, Bushra Dohai.
Institute of Network Biology (INET), Molecular Targets and Therapeutics Center (MTTC), Helmholtz Munich, German Research Center for Environmental Health, Neuherberg, Germany
Veronika Young, Bushra Dohai, Hridi Halder, Benjamin Weller, Chung-Wen Lin, Ye Min Tun, Luisa Pletschacher, Patrick Schwehn, Simin T. Rothballer, Melina Altmann, Stefan Altmann, Alexandra Strobel, Michael Rothballer, Claudia Falter & Pascal Falter-Braun
Aix-Marseille University, INSERM, TAGC, UMR_S1090, Turing Center for Living Systems, Marseille, France
Jaime Fernandez-Macgregor, Deeya Saha, Mégane Boujeant, Sébastien A. Choteau, Lou Bergogne, Jérémie Perrin, Christine Brun & Andreas Zanzoni
Aix-Marseille University, CNRS, AFMB, UMR CNRS 7257, Turing Center for Living Systems, Marseille, France
Jaime Fernandez-Macgregor & Renaud Vincentelli
Center for Translational Immunology, University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands
Niels S. van Heusden, Daan K. J. Pieren & Sonja Rittchen
Functional Microbiome Research Group, Institute of Medical Microbiology, University Hospital of RWTH Aachen, Aachen, Germany
Thomas C. A. Hitch & Thomas Clavel
Department of Microbiology and Ecosystem Science, Research Network: Chemistry meets Microbiology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
Patrick Hyden & Thomas Rattei
Center for Cancer Systems Biology (CCSB), Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, MA, USA
Luke Lambourne, Michael A. Calderwood & Marc Vidal
Department of Genetics, Blavatnik Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
Luke Lambourne, Michael A. Calderwood & Marc Vidal
Department of Cancer Biology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, MA, USA
Luke Lambourne, Michael A. Calderwood & Marc Vidal
Laboratory of Viral Interactomes, GIGA Institute, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium
Sibusiso B. Maseko & Jean-Claude Twizere
Dr von Hauner Children's Hospital, Department of Pediatrics, University Hospital, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, Munich, Germany
Jonas Bibus & Daniel Kotlarz
Research Unit Signaling and Translation, Molecular Targets and Therapeutics Center (MTTC), Helmholtz Munich, German Research Center for Environmental Health, Neuherberg, Germany
Franziska Ober, Marie Tofaute & Daniel Krappmann
Institute of Translational Genomics, Helmholtz Zentrum München, German Research Center for Environmental Health, Neuherberg, Germany
Daniel Kotlarz
German Center for Child and Adolescent Health (DZKJ), partner site Munich, Munich, Germany
Daniel Kotlarz
Institute of Computational Biology (ICB), Computational Health Center, Helmholtz Munich, German Research Center for Environmental Health, Neuherberg, Germany
Matthias Heinig
Department of Computer Science, TUM School of Computation, Information and Technology, Technical University of Munich, Garching, Germany
Matthias Heinig
TERRA Teaching and Research Centre, University of Liège, Gembloux, Belgium
Jean-Claude Twizere
Laboratory of Algal Synthetic and Systems Biology, Division of Science, New York University Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Jean-Claude Twizere
Center for Translational Immunology, Pediatrics Department, University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands
Marianne Boes
CNRS, Marseille, France
Christine Brun
Microbe-Host Interactions, Faculty of Biology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) München, Planegg-Martinsried, Germany
Pascal Falter-Braun
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P.F.-B. conceived the project. P.H., T.R., T.C.A.H., S.A., C.B., A.Z. and P.F.-B. performed T3SS and effector identification. V.Y., H.H., B.W., S.T.R., M.R., M.A., A.S. and P.F.-B. performed ORF cloning. J.F.-M., L.B. and A.Z. conducted structural pathogen–commensal comparison. H.H., B.W., S.T.R., Y.M.T., L.P., B.D. and P.F.-B. conducted injection assays. V.Y., S.T.R., B.W., P.S., A.S. and P.F.-B. performedY2H analyses. V.Y., M.A., S.A., M. Boujeant, A.Z., C.F. and P.F.-B. curated bhLit-BM data. B.D., D.S., V.Y., J.F.-M., L.L., L.B., J.P., C.-W.L., M.H., C.B., A.Z. and P.F.-B. performed data analyses. B.W., S.T.R. and V.Y. conducted yN2H validation assays. S.A.C., L.B., J.P. and A.Z. performed interface-SLiMs analyses. L.L., B.D., M.A.C., M.V. and P.F.-B. conducted interface-AF analyses. J.F.-M., S.B.M., J.-C.T. and R.V. performed the holdup and peptide assays. T.C.A.H. and T.C. analysed effector ecology. V.Y., N.S.v.H., D.K.J.P., S.R., F.O., M.T., J.B., D. Kotlarz, D. Krappmann, M. Boes and P.F.-B. performed cell-based assays. V.Y., B.D., H.H., J.F.-M. and P.F.-B. generated visualization and developed the figures. P.F.-B., C.F., A.Z., C.B., T.R. and D. Krappmann acquired funding. P.F.-B., B.D., A.Z., V.Y., B.W., T.H. and C.F. wrote the manuscript.
Correspondence to
Andreas Zanzoni or Pascal Falter-Braun.
The authors declare no competing interests.
Nature Microbiology thanks Kenichi Tsuda, Tamas Korcsmaros and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer reviewer reports are available.
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a, Effector complements comparison of the 44 T3SS+ Pseudomonadota reference strains. Numbers indicate the count of shared effectors at > 90% mutual sequence similarity across 90% common sequence length among the indicated strains (Supplementary Data 1). b, Abundance of secretion systems in Pseudomonadota genomes among the 77 reference strains of human intestinal and stool samples, in a collection of 4,475 strains isolated from normal human guts (HBC/BIO-ML/GMC strains) and in meta-assembled genomes (MAG) of normal human guts. c, Similarity of identified 182 candidate effectors from the 770 T3SS+ MAGs with 1,195 effectors from pathogenic microbes across the range of alignment coverages. Full data for all panels in Supplementary Data 4. d, Cloning success: success rates of effector open reading frame (ORF) cloning for the indicated reference strains, and the number of obtained and sequence verified ORFs (on top of bars) (Supplementary Data 7). e, Luminescence from injection assays with Salmonella Typhimurium wt and ΔsctV strains expressing SipA, and Citrobacter pasteurii and Phytobacter massiliensis expressing the indicated effectors. Each data point represents a single technical replicate. f. Western blots showing expression of FLAG-tagged effectors in wt and ΔsctV S. Typhimurium in the indicated strains.
a, Schematic of the multi-assay screening pipeline based on initial screening of bacterial ORFs against the human ORFeome 9.1. The primary screening involved screening against human protein pools, followed by retesting of positives, identification of candidate pairs by sequencing and final, independent four-fold verification. b, Detection rates of protein pairs in different sets across varying thresholds in yN2H. Fractions scoring positive of the HuMMI dataset and benchmarking datasets (hsPRS-v2, bhLit_BM-v1, hsRRS-v2, bhRRS-v1) depending on the threshold of the normalized luminescence ratio (NLR). Full data in Supplementary Data 14. c, Co-immunoprecipitation of indicated Myc-tagged human proteins by indicated FLAG-tagged effectors or FLAG-GFP as negative control. Input: Cell lysates. Molecular weight markers are given in kDa. Dark green dots: successful co-immunoprecipitation. Light green dots: successful co-immunoprecipitation, but weak or no effector detection in lysate. Blot lanes were partially rearranged.
a, Jaccard-interaction similarity of all interacting effector-pairs with at least three shared human interactors. Color-intensity correlates with Jaccard-index. Effector pairs marked with “H” share the same homology cluster. Clusters are color-coded according to the legend. b, Actual count of motif-domain pairs matching at least two stringency criteria identified in HuMMIMAIN (arrow) compared to n = 10,000 randomized control networks (empirical P = 0.0003). c, (Top) Distribution of residue–residue contacts across predicted aligned error (PAE) scores for interfaces between bacterial effectors and their human targets. (Bottom) Proportions of human–human protein pairs targeted by the same bacterial effector, grouped by interface similarity at different PAE thresholds (Jaccard Index (JI) categories: Distinct ≤ 0.1, Overlapping 0.1–0.6, Same ≥ 0.6). Pie charts show similarity distributions for contacts with PAE ≤ 9Å (50th percentile), PAE ≤ 21Å (75th percentile), and PAE ≤ 30 Å (95th percentile). d, Top: Distribution of residue–residue contacts across predicted aligned error (PAE) scores for interfaces between human proteins and their bacterial effectors. Bottom: Proportions of bacterial effector–effector pairs targeting the same human protein, grouped by interface similarity at different PAE thresholds (JI categories: Distinct ≤ 0.1, Overlapping 0.1 – 0.6, Same ≥ 0.6). Pie charts show similarity distributions for contacts with PAE ≤ 9 Å (50th percentile), PAE ≤ 21Å (75th percentile), and PAE ≤ 30 Å (95th percentile). e, GO enrichment for convergence proteins. OR of functional annotations enriched among effector-targeted human proteins that are subject of convergence (FDR < 0.05, Fisher's exact test with Bonferroni FDR correction). Full data and precise FDR and OR values in Supplementary Data 20.
a. Relative NF-κB transcriptional reporter activity of HEK293 cells expressing the indicated effectors under TNF-stimulated conditions (Kruskal-Wallis test with Dunn's post-hoc comparisons, * P < 0.05, ** P = 0.01, n = 4 biological replicates). Boxes represent IQR, with the bold black line representing the mean; whiskers indicate highest and lowest data point within 1.5 IQR. b, Representative anti-Hemagglutinin (HA) and anti-Flag (FLAG) Western blots showing expression of transfected effector proteins relative to actin control (ACT), which was run on a different blot. Empty pMH-Flag-HA (pMH), empty pEF4 (pEF). c. Representative proliferation curves of Caco-2 cells transfected with empty vector (EV) or Cpa_12 in basal conditions (unstim) or following pro-inflammatory stimulation (stim) over 72 h after sorting. Error bars indicate one standard deviation above and below the mean. d, Concentration of cytokines secreted by Caco-2 cells transfected with the indicated effectors in basal conditions (US) or following stimulation with the indicated elicitors. EV indicates empty vector mock control. Indicated P values calculated by Kruskal-Wallis test with Dunn's post-hoc comparisons (n = 5). Boxes represent IQR, with the bold black line representing the mean; whiskers indicate highest and lowest data point. Raw measurements, n, and precise P values for all panels in Supplementary Data 24 and 25.
Guide to Supplementary Data providing an overview of 26 thematically organized datasets, each introduced by a summary sheet describing the contents of every worksheet.
T3SS identification in reference strains.
TxSS identification in HBC/UHGG collections.
T3SS identification in metagenome assemblies.
Prediction of T3SS effectors.
Commensal versus pathogen effectors.
Structural effector analysis and Foldseek clustering.
Effector cloning.
Phylogenetic assignments of strains used in this study.
Effector identifiers and abbreviations used in this study.
Injection assays raw data and statistics.
Human–microbiome meta-interactome.
Reference interaction sets.
Assay sensitivity.
Validation rate.
Interactions between pathogens effectors and human proteins downloaded from IMEXs.
Relationship between effector interaction profile and effector sequence similarity.
AlphaFold2 interaction interface in HuMMI.
Domain–motif interface predictions.
Holdup assay and validation of PBM–PDZ interface predictions.
Functional enrichment analysis of targets.
Genetic predisposition enrichment of effector targets.
Prevalence of HuMMI effector proteins across the OhJ_2014 skin cohort.
Genetic predisposition trait enrichment in effector target neighbourhoods identified by RWR.
NF-kB assays.
Cytokine assays.
Prevalence of HuMMI effector proteins in IBD versus healthy patients.
Unprocessed western blots.
Unprocessed western blots.
Unprocessed western blots.
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Young, V., Dohai, B., Halder, H. et al. Effector–host interactome map links type III secretion systems in healthy gut microbiomes to immune modulation.
Nat Microbiol (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41564-025-02241-y
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Received: 25 September 2023
Accepted: 11 December 2025
Published: 26 January 2026
Version of record: 26 January 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41564-025-02241-y
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Nature Photonics
(2026)Cite this article
Time-invariant photonic structures amplify or absorb light on the basis of their intrinsic material gain or loss. The coherent interference of multiple beams in space, for example, in a resonator, can be exploited to tailor the wave interaction with material gain or loss, respectively maximizing lasing or coherent perfect absorption. By contrast, a time-varying system is not bound to conserve energy, even in the absence of material gain or loss, and can support amplification or absorption of a probe wave through parametric phenomena. Here we demonstrate theoretically and experimentally how a subwavelength film of indium tin oxide, whose bulk permittivity is homogeneously and periodically modulated via optical pumping, can be dynamically tuned to act both as a non-resonant amplifier and as a perfect absorber, by manipulating the relative phase of two counterpropagating probe beams. This extends the concept of coherent perfect absorption to the temporal domain. We interpret this result as selective switching between the gain and loss modes present in the momentum bandgap of a periodically modulated medium. By tailoring the relative intensity of the two probes, high-contrast modulation can be achieved with up to 80% absorption and 400% amplification. Our results demonstrate control of gain and loss in time-varying media at optical frequencies and pave the way towards coherent manipulation of light in Floquet-engineered complex photonic systems.
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Data used in this work are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request.
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A.A., R.T. and E.G. were partially supported by the US Department of Defense and the Simons Collaboration on Extreme Wave Phenomena. E.G. acknowledges funding from the Simons Foundation through a Junior Fellowship of the Simons Society of Fellows (855344/EG). A.C.H. acknowledges support from the Val O'Donoghue Scholarship in Natural Sciences. R.S. and S.V. acknowledge support from UKRI (EP/Y015673). R.S. and S.V. are supported by the European Research Council (ERC) (Grant agreement No. 101201360 - LUMINOUS).
These authors contributed equally: Emanuele Galiffi, Anthony C. Harwood.
Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA
Emanuele Galiffi
Photonics Initiative, Advanced Science Research Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA
Emanuele Galiffi, Romain Tirole & Andrea Alù
The Blackett Laboratory, Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus, London, UK
Anthony C. Harwood, Stefano Vezzoli, Romain Tirole & Riccardo Sapienza
Physics Program, Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA
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E.G. devised the concept and developed the theoretical model. A.C.H., S.V. and R.T. built the experimental set-up and carried out experimental measurements. A.C.H., S.V. and E.G. carried out data analysis and model fitting. R.S. and A.A. supervised the project. All authors contributed to scientific discussions and preparation of the manuscript.
Correspondence to
Emanuele Galiffi, Andrea Alù or Riccardo Sapienza.
The authors declare no competing interests.
Nature Photonics thanks Stefan Rotter and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
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Supplementary Figs. 1–7. Supplementary discussions of (1) theory for temporal coherent control in ITO films; (2) coherent modulation for different wavelengths and fluctuation sources; (3) pump power dependence; and (4) transmission and negative refraction from the back of the sample.
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-025-01833-8
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Nature Sustainability
(2026)Cite this article
Accurate projections of heating and cooling demands are crucial for advancing towards the sustainable development goals. Here we present a global dataset of heating degree days (HDDs) and cooling degree days (CDDs) for 3 levels of global mean temperature rise above pre-industrial conditions—1.0 °C (2006–2016), 1.5 °C and 2.0 °C—regardless of the pathways leading to these warming scenarios. The dataset comprises 30 gridded maps (0.883° × 0.556° resolution) characterizing climate variability through 5 statistical metrics per variable and scenario over a representative 10-year period. The dataset reveals a widespread decline in HDDs and a pronounced, nonlinear increase in CDDs, with the most significant shifts in climate intensity and adaptation needs emerging early in the warming trajectory. Furthermore, using the ‘middle-of-the-road' Shared Socioeconomic Pathway 2-4.5 as a reference, the dataset indicates that the population experiencing extreme heat conditions (exceeding 3,000 CDDs) is projected to nearly double if the 2.0 °C threshold is reached, increasing from 23% (1.54 billion people) in 2010 to 41% (3.79 billion) by 2050, with the largest projected populations affected in India, Nigeria, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan and the Philippines. This HDD–CDD dataset provides a robust foundation for integrating climate information into sustainability planning and development policy.
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The global gridded dataset of HDDs and CDDs under the three climate change scenarios (1 °C, 1.5 °C and 2 °C) is available in the Oxford University Research Archive (ORA) repository at https://doi.org/10.5287/ora-w4qpqy522. Five maps are available for HDDs and CDDs per scenario: mean, median, 10th percentile, 90th percentile and standard deviation. The complete list of maps for each global warming level is provided in Extended Data Table 1. The spatial resolution is 0.833° × 0.556° (longitude latitude) over the land surface. Further data are available from the authors on request.
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This research received support from the University of Oxford Strategic Research Fund and the Oxford Martin School's Future of Cooling Programme. J.L. acknowledges funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 101023241). S.N.S. was funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI, NE/P002099/1). To ensure open access, we have granted a CC BY licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript resulting from this work. We are also grateful to M. Z. Walker and R. Renaldi for their valuable contributions to the early stages of the research concept.
ZERO Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Jesus Lizana, David C. H. Wallom, Radhika Khosla & Malcolm McCulloch
Future of Cooling Programme, Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Jesus Lizana, Nicole D. Miranda, Radhika Khosla & Malcolm McCulloch
Energy and Power Group, Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Jesus Lizana, Nicole D. Miranda & Malcolm McCulloch
Oxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Sarah N. Sparrow & David C. H. Wallom
Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Radhika Khosla
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R.K., D.C.H.W. and M.M. conceptualized the work proposed. J.L. and N.D.M. coordinated the study. N.D.M. performed the data extraction and data management. J.L. performed the data pre-processing of the climate model. J.L. calculated and generated the CDD and HDD datasets. J.L. provided the statistics and visualizations available in the paper. J.L. wrote the paper draft. S.N.S. and D.C.H.W. led the interpretation and analysis of the data. S.N.S. provided expertise in data analytics. All authors reviewed the paper.
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Jesus Lizana.
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a, Absolute change in HDD (Delta HDD) between the 1.0 °C and 1.5 °C scenario. b, Absolute change in HDD (Delta HDD) between 1.5 °C and 2.0 °C. c, Absolute change in HDD (Delta HDD) between 1.0 °C and 2.0 °C. Delta HDD (ΔHDD) refers to the incremental/decremental change in mean annual HDD per grid. Administrative boundary data © EuroGeographics 2025.
a, Absolute change in CDD (Delta CDD) from 1.0 °C to 1.5 °C scenario. b, Absolute change in CDD (Delta CDD) from 1.5 °C to 2.0 °C scenario. c, Absolute change in CDD (Delta CDD) between 1.0 °C and 2.0 °C. Delta CDD (ΔCDD) refers to the incremental/decremental change in mean annual CDD per grid. Administrative boundary data © EuroGeographics 2025.
Supplementary Notes 1–7.
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Lizana, J., Miranda, N.D., Sparrow, S.N. et al. Global gridded dataset of heating and cooling degree days under climate change scenarios.
Nat Sustain (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-025-01754-y
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Received: 17 January 2025
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Published: 26 January 2026
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-025-01754-y
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We are providing an unedited version of this manuscript to give early access to its
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Emotional experiences involve more than bodily reactions and momentary feelings—they depend on knowledge about the world that spans contexts and time. Although it is well established that individuals conceptualize emotions using a low-dimensional space organized by valence and arousal, the neural mechanisms giving rise to this configuration remain unclear. Here, we examine whether hippocampal-prefrontal circuits—neural structures implicated in forming cognitive maps—also support the structural abstraction of emotional experiences. Using functional MRI data collected as participants viewed emotionally evocative film clips, we find that hippocampal activity represents emotion concepts in a structured hierarchy, whereas ventromedial prefrontal cortex more accurately tracks locations in a two-dimensional affective space. Computational modeling reveals that hippocampal-prefrontal responses to films can be predicted based on the statistical regularities of emotion transitions across multiple temporal scales. These findings demonstrate that hippocampal-prefrontal systems represent emotion concepts in a map-like way at multiple levels of abstraction, offering insight into how the brain organizes emotion knowledge.
The fMRI data are available on OpenNeuro111 (https://doi.org/10.18112/openneuro.ds004892.v1.0.0). The emotion rating data are available on OpenNeuro112 (https://doi.org/10.18112/openneuro.ds004872.v1.0.1).
Code for all analyses is available at https://github.com/ecco-laboratory/EmotionConceptRepresentation113 and archived on Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17856746). Code for training the TEM is adapted from https://github.com/jbakermans/torch_tem. The MATLAB interface used for creating TEM environments is available at https://github.com/jbakermans/WorldBuilder.
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This work was supported in part by NIH National Institute of Mental Health R01MH134972 (P.A.K.). We thank Joseph Manns, Peter Hitchcock, and members of the ECCO lab for discussions and comments on a previous version of this manuscript.
Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Yumeng Ma & Philip A. Kragel
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Carbon sequestration in shale gas operations represents a crucial pathway to achieve Geological Negative Emissions, which is essential for global 1.5 °C targets. However, the emissions reduction potential and economic viability of this approach in China's shale gas value chain remain unclear. This study quantifies the potential for transforming China's shale gas value chain from an emission source to a carbon sink, while revealing spatial heterogeneity in economic feasibility. Results demonstrate that synergistic deployment of CO2-based technologies can achieve Geological Negative Emissions across the value chain, with national carbon sink potential reaching 66 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalents and shale gas production increasing by 4,518 billion cubic meters. Multi-scenario economic assessments reveal that marine shale in the Sichuan Basin exhibits inherent profitability, whereas continental reservoirs require carbon credit integration or optimized production. Current Chinese carbon market prices provide insufficient incentives, implementing region-specific subsidies and enhancing carbon pricing frameworks could unlock this potential, thereby contributing to national carbon neutrality goals and multiple Sustainable Development Goals.
The authors declare that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the paper and its supplementary information files. Source data are provided with this paper.
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This research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant Nos. 52325005, 72293602, and 52388101 to S.L.), the General Research Fund (grant No. 12616222 to M.G.) and Early Career Scheme (grant No. 22611624 to M.G.) of Hong Kong Research Grants Council, and the Guangdong Natural Science Fund (grant No. 2025A1515010017 to M.G.).
Department of Geography, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China
Pu Hong, Meiyu Guo & Wenrui Shi
Guangdong Basic Research Center of Excellence for Ecological Security and Green Development, Key Laboratory for City Cluster Environmental Safety and Green Development of the Ministry of Education, School of Ecology, Environment and Resources, Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou, China
Sai Liang & Yumeng Li
State Key Joint Laboratory of Environment Simulation and Pollution Control, School of Environment, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
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M.G. and P.H. conceived the project. P.H. conducted data retrieval and performed subsequent evaluation calculations. M.G. and W.S. supervised part of the model construction. M.G., S.L., and X.L. jointly guided the writing framework. Y.L. advised on the visualization design. P.H., M.G., and S.L. co-wrote and revised the manuscript.
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Controlling the low energy spectrum at the nanoscale with an external physical parameter has become an important resource for quantum devices. The emergence of an energy gap is one such key feature, linked to the mitigation of decoherence needed for quantum information processing. Indeed, the detrimental effects of high-energy uncontrolled excitations can only be cured at some specific tuning points in general. Achieving an energy gap is a natural way to extend decoherence countermeasures over a finite region of parameter space. This would be particularly useful in view of the recent efforts to build superconducting topological chains in a top-down approach. In this work, we demonstrate a large energy gap by spatially modulating the local potential of a suspended carbon nanotube, exploiting an analogy with condensed matter systems. This gap is homogeneous on the nanotube and tunable by about two orders of magnitude, bringing the electronic system from an insulating state to a near-metallic state at low temperatures.
The data that support the findings of this work are available from the corresponding authors upon request.
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We thank L. De Medici and D. Roditchev for fruitful discussions. Fundings: This work was supported by the French National Research Agency (ANR) MITIQ (T.K.), the ANR JCJC STOIC (ANR-22-CE30-0009) (M.R.D.), the BPI project QUARBONE (T.K.), by the ANR through the France 2030 programme through the PEPR MIRACLEQ (ANR-23-PETQ-0003) (M.R.D.), the QRADES Quantera project (T.K. and A.C.), and the DarkQuantum ERC project (T.K. and A.C.).
These authors contributed equally: M. R. Delbecq, T. Kontos.
Laboratoire de Physique de l'École normale supérieure, ENS, Université PSL, CNRS, Sorbonne Université, Université Paris Cité, Paris, France
J. Craquelin, L. Jarjat, B. Hue, A. Théry, C. Fruy, A. Cottet, M. R. Delbecq & T. Kontos
Laboratoire de Physique et d'Étude des Matériaux, ESPCI Paris, PSL University, CNRS, Sorbonne Université, Paris, France
J. Craquelin, L. Jarjat, B. Hue, A. Théry, C. Fruy, A. Cottet, M. R. Delbecq & T. Kontos
C12 Quantum Electronics, Paris, France
B. Hue, N. Struchkov, D. Stefani & M. M. Desjardins
Institut universitaire de France (IUF), Paris, France
M. R. Delbecq
Institute of Astrophysics, FORTH, GR-71110, Heraklion, Greece
T. Kontos
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M.R.D. and T.K. designed and supervised the experiment. J.C. fabricated the device and performed the measurements. J.C. did the modelling with inputs from A.C., M.R.D., and T.K. L.J., B.H., A.T., and C.F. contributed to the data taking and the data acquisition setup. N.S., D.S., and M.M.D. provided the carbon nanotube material and contributed to the nano-assembly setup. T.K. wrote the manuscript with inputs from all the authors. M.R.D. and T.K. co-supervised this work.
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M. R. Delbecq or T. Kontos.
Authors affiliated with C12 Quantum Electronics have financial interest in the company. T.K. and M.R.D. declare equity interest in C12 Quantum Electronics. J.C., L.J., B.H., A.T., C.F., and A.C. declare no competing interests.
Nature Communications thanks the anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work. A peer review file is available.
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Wild Arachis species exhibit abundant genetic diversity for peanut improvement. However, the evolutionary history of their genomes is unclear. Here, through comparative oligopainting, we establish a one-to-one correspondence between microscopically observed chromosomes and sequenced pseudomolecules of Arachis duranensis, A. ipaensis, and cultivated peanut, and determine the 10 homoeologous groups (Hgs) of the A, B, F, K, and H genomes. Analysis of the telomere-to-telomere (T2T) genome assembly of A. hoehnei reveals that its genome is a diverging form of the A genome and is designated as genome A'. In addition, the unique small chromosome A08 is originated from two inversions and a substantial contraction of A'08. We propose a genome evolution model of the Arachis genus, where A' bridges the A and B genomes. We further report an artificial hexaploid peanut derived from a hybrid of cultivated peanut and A. hoehnei, and identify differentially expressed genes against web blotch in A. hoehnei.
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We thank Yonghua Han (Jiangsu Normal University, Xuzhou, China) for help in designing and labeling the oligonucleotide libraries. We thank Robert McIntosh, University of Sydney, Australia, for his kind review, suggestions, and language editing. We are also grateful to Dawn M. Schmidt (www.editbydawn.com) for English editing. This project is supported by Henan Province Science and Technology R&D Joint Fund (232301420025 to P.D.), National Natural Science Foundation of China (32272153 to P.D. and 32501918 to L.F.), the Key Research Project of the Shennong Laboratory (SN01-2022-03 to X.Z.), China Agriculture Research System (CARS-13 to X.Z.), Henan Provincial Agriculture Research System (S2012-5 to W.D.), and innovation team of peanut breeding (2024TD01 to X.Z.). The funding agencies played no role in the design of the study and collection, analysis, and interpretation of data or in writing the manuscript.
These authors contributed equally: Pei Du, Liuyang Fu, Guoquan Chen.
The Shennong Laboratory/Nation Industrial Innovation Centre for Bio-Breeding/Key Laboratory of Oil Crops in Huang-Huai-Hai Plains, Ministry of Agriculture/Henan Provincial Key Laboratory for Oil Crops Improvement/Institute of Crop Molecular Breeding, Henan Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Zhengzhou, Henan, China
Pei Du, Suoyi Han, Xiaobo Wang, Ziqi Sun, Hua Liu, Lijuan Miao, Li Qin, Jing Xu, Zhongxin Zhang, Zheng Zheng, Wenzhao Dong & Xinyou Zhang
School of Life Sciences, Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, Henan, China
Liuyang Fu, Guoquan Chen, Qian Wang, Zhiyuan Zhou & Xuemin Xu
State Key Laboratory of Crop Genetics and Germplasm Enhancement & Utilization, Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing, China
Chenyu Li & Zengjun Qi
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X.Z., Z.Q. and P.D. designed and supervised the project. P.D., L.F., G.C., Q.W., C.L., Zhiyuan Z., and L.M. performed the experiments. S.H., X.W., Z.S., Zhiyuan Z., X.X., H.L., L.Q., J.X. and Zhongxin Z. analyzed the data. P.D., G.C. and L.F. wrote the manuscript. X.Z., Z.Q., W.D., and Zheng Z. provided critical guidance for the revision of the manuscript.
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Zengjun Qi or Xinyou Zhang.
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Nature Communications thanks David Bertioli, Chuanzhi Zhao and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. A peer review file is available.
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Du, P., Fu, L., Chen, G. et al. Origin of small chromosome A08 and genome evolution of Arachis species.
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Advances in network neuroscience challenge the view that general intelligence (g) emerges from a primary brain region or network. Network Neuroscience Theory (NNT) proposes that g arises from coordinated activity across the brain's global network architecture. We tested predictions from NNT in 831 healthy young adults from the Human Connectome Project. We jointly modeled the brain's structural topology and intrinsic functional covariation patterns to capture its global topological organization. Our investigation provided evidence that g (1) engages multiple networks, supporting the principle of distributed processing; (2) relies on weak, long-range connections, emphasizing an efficient and globally coordinated network; (3) recruits regions that orchestrate network interactions, supporting the role of modal control in driving global activity; and (4) depends on a small-world architecture for system-wide communication. These results support a shift in perspective from prevailing localist models to a theory that grounds intelligence in the global topology of the human connectome.
The data that support the main findings of this study are available from the Human Connectome Project www.humanconnectome.org/study/hcp-young-adult. The data that support findings in the supplemental materials are not currently available to the public. This is due to the fact that the original informed consent protocol did not include provisions for data sharing, and therefore, ethical restrictions prevent the distribution of participant data. Data for all figures are available in the Source Data.zip file accompanying this manuscript. Source data are provided with this paper.
Code for data processing and analyses related to results presented in the main text are available at www.github.com/ramseywilcox/jsfm_hcp. Code for data processing and analyses related to results in the supplemental materials are available at www.github.com/ramseywilcox/jsfm_insight.
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We gratefully acknowledge the Human Connectome Project, WU-Minn Consortium (PIs: David Van Essen and Kamil Ugurbil) for collecting and providing the data analyzed in the main text of this publication. We also thank the INSIGHT investigators and project team for collecting the data analyzed in the Supplemental Materials. This project would not have been possible without the hard work of the numerous fellows, students, and staff that comprised such a fantastic research team. This research was funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), via Contract 2014-13121700004 to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (PI: Aron K. Barbey) and the Department of Defense, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), via Contract 2019-HR00111990067 to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (PI: Aron K. Barbey). The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of the IARPA, DARPA, or US Government.
Decision Neuroscience Laboratory, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA
Ramsey R. Wilcox & Aron K. Barbey
Notre Dame Human Neuroimaging Center, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA
Ramsey R. Wilcox & Aron K. Barbey
Department of Psychology, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA
Ramsey R. Wilcox & Aron K. Barbey
AI Innovation Institute, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA
Babak Hemmatian & Lav R. Varshney
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, USA
Lav R. Varshney
Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, USA
Aron K. Barbey
Department of Bioengineering, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, USA
Aron K. Barbey
Beckman Institute, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, USA
Aron K. Barbey
Institute for Defense Analyses, Alexandria, VA, USA
Aron K. Barbey
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R.R.W.: data curation, formal analysis, methodology, software, validation, visualization, writing—original draft, writing—review and editing. B.H.: methodology, writing—original draft, writing—review and editing. L.L.V.: methodology, writing—original draft, writing—review and editing. A.K.B.: funding acquisition, investigation, methodology, project administration, resources, supervision, writing—original draft, writing—review and editing.
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Nature Communications thanks Yaniv Assaf and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. A peer review file is available.
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Skylight, a TikTok alternative built on open source technology, is benefiting from concerns that arose over TikTok U.S.'s change in ownership last week. The startup, a maker of a short-form, vertical video app similar to TikTok, says it has now topped over 380,000 users and is continuing to grow after a busy weekend.
Launched last year and backed by Mark Cuban and other investors, Skylight's mobile app is built on the AT Protocol, the technology that also powers the decentralized X rival, Bluesky, which now has north of 42 million users.
Skylight, co-founded by CEO Tori White and CTO Reed Harmeyer, offers a built-in video editor, user profiles, support for likes, commenting, and sharing, and the ability for community curators to create custom feeds for others to follow.
The app now has over 150,000 videos uploaded directly to the platform. It can also stream videos from Bluesky because of its AT Protocol integration.
Harmeyer said Saturday that 1.4 million videos were played on the app the day before, up 3x over the past 24 hours. The app had also seen signups increase more than 150%. Other noteworthy stats include over a 50% increase in returning users, over 40% rise in video played on average, and over 100% increase in posts created.
This surge was likely triggered by concerns over TikTok's change in ownership and its unfortunately timed technical glitches.
TikTok had announced on January 22 the establishment of the TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, designed to comply with Trump's executive order requiring the company's U.S. operations be sold to a group of American investors. TikTok's Chinese parent ByteDance will now own less than 20% of the new entity.
The deal was a result of increased tensions between the U.S. and China, which led to concerns that TikTok could be a threat to national security, both by collecting data on U.S. citizens and through algorithmic influence. Now, however, some of TikTok's users are more worried about the new American investors and their allegiance to Trump.
Those concerns grew to a head when TikTok pushed out an updated privacy policy, which includes permission to track users' GPS coordinates, among other things. Users also pointed to language in the privacy policy that said the app would track immigration status. Although that language was not new, and its inclusion has to do with adherence to state privacy laws, some users began encouraging people to delete the app.
While it's unknown how many TikTok users actually followed through, what is clear is that some people sought out alternatives. Over the weekend, Skylight's CEO Tori White said the app added around 20,000 new users and is continuing to grow. So far this January, the app has seen around 95,000 monthly active users.
White credited the app's more open and customizable nature as the force behind its growth.
While Skylight has made notable gains, it's still overshadowed by TikTok and its 200 million monthly active U.S. users. Still, Skylight's founders believe their approach provides an opening for growth.
“We've seen what happens when one person dictates what's pushed into people's feeds,” White told TechCrunch. “Not only does it harm a creator's connection with their followers, but the entire health of the platform. That's why we built Skylight Social on open standards. We wanted creator and user power to be guaranteed by the technology. Not an empty promise, but an irrevocable right.”
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Claude users will now be able to call up interactive apps within the chatbot interface, thanks to a new feature announced by Anthropic on Monday.
In keeping with Anthropic's enterprise focus, the launch apps are mostly workplace tools, including Slack, Canva, Figma, Box, and Clay, with a Salesforce implementation expected soon. In each case, the app will enable a logged-in instance of the service that's accessible to Claude, enabling users to send Slack messages, generate charts, or access cloud files, depending on which apps have been enabled.
“Analyzing data, designing content, and managing projects all work better with a dedicated visual interface,” Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the feature. “Combined with Claude's intelligence, you can work and iterate faster than either could offer alone.”
The new feature is available to Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers, but not free users. Eligible users can activate the tools at claude.ai/directory.
The system is similar to OpenAI's Apps system, which launched in October and also enables interactive third-party tools. Both systems of app integrations are built on the Model Context Protocol, an open standard introduced by Anthropic in 2024. MCP launched support for apps in November, drawing on work from both companies.
The new apps will be particularly powerful when integrated with Claude Cowork, an all-purpose agent tool launched by Anthropic last week. Built on top of Claude Code, Cowork lets users assign multi-stage tasks that draw on large and open-ended datasets — tasks that would have previously required terminal commands. Combined with the new apps feature, Cowork could be granted access to cloud files or ongoing work projects. For example, Cowork could update a marketing graphic in Figma or use new data from the company's Box instance.
Apps are not available in Cowork at launch, but Anthropic said the integration would be “coming soon.”
Agentic systems can be unpredictable, and Anthropic's own safety documentation for Cowork encourages users to monitor the agent closely and not grant any unnecessary permissions.
“Be cautious about granting access to sensitive information like financial documents, credentials, or personal records,” the company recommends. “Consider creating a dedicated working folder for Claude rather than granting broad access.”
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This isn't just another Intel chip launch. Far from it. For years, most updates to Intel's laptop chips have been nothing more than modest performance increases over the previous year. That's not the case with the long-awaited arrival of Panther Lake.
It's a chip design announced almost five years ago as part of the company's ambitious rescue plan to get back on track. Intel's CEO at the time (and mastermind of the grand plan), Pat Gelsinger, called the technology the “cornerstone of the company's turnaround strategy.” Now, I have a laptop in front of me with this Panther Lake chip inside, officially known as the Intel Core Ultra Series 3. Having tested it myself, I'm left extremely impressed. I'm not sure if the Series 3 will redeem Intel's recent foibles, but these chips certainly feel like a big win for a company that really needs one.
To succeed with the Core Ultra Series 3, Intel at least needed to fulfill the promises it made when the chips were announced last year. Namely, battery life and efficiency equivalent to its predecessor (Lunar Lake) with improved performance. That alone has been a major hurdle for the kind of x86 processors Intel has always made. The company has also boldly claimed that its higher-powered silicon for gaming laptops will do the opposite: maintain the performance of last year's chips with added efficiency for better battery life. That is, yet again, another tall order.
I tested the Core Ultra X9 388H, representing the top of the range of the new Intel Core Ultra Series 3 line of chips. The chip was tested in a 16-inch Lenovo IdeaPad reference unit. These are both 16-core CPUs, and it is broken dow nto four performance cores, eight efficiency cores, and four low-power efficiency cores.
Interestingly, this is actually two fewer performance cores than the Core Ultra 9 285H, though it gets confusing as to which chip from the Intel Core Ultra Series 2 this chip is the successor to. In other words, there's no exact one-to-one here in terms of comparing price and performance. Here's a sampling of the scores it posted in my testing.
As you can see, this new Intel chip now sit at the top of the stack in terms of multi-core performance, outside the M4 Pro. Coming back with a chip that outperforms Apple's latest M5 by this much is no easy feat, but Intel pulled it off. The same is true in the graphics department, where Intel has taken the lead in integrated graphics.
The Core Ultra 7 258V listed above was tested in the Dell 14 Plus, though, which is a smaller laptop than the Lenovo. As you can see, the Core ultra X9 388H easily surpasses the current-generation M4 MacBook Air.
But Intel still can't compete on single-core performance against Apple, and that's where the improvement is the most modest. Across the board, it's also not as fast as the M4 Pro or M4 Max, which still have the edge in every category, though the difference in multi-core performance between the X9 and the M4 Pro is only 14 percent. Apple's M5 Pro and M5 Max are just around the corner, too. I'd also love to test the Core Ultra X7358H against upcoming processors in next-gen laptops like the Snapdragon X2 Elite Enhanced, but I don't have them on hand yet for comparisons.
The graphics really stand out, though. For once, the inclusion of the “X” branding in the name actually feels worthwhile. The X9 chip (a well as the X7) use a B390 GPU, representing the top of the line in Intel's architecture (outside of discrete desktop graphics cards). You get 12 Xe cores in the X7 and X9 configurations, the only difference between the two being clock speed. Intel claimed that Panther Lake graphics were 77 percent faster than in the previous-gen Lunar Lake laptops, and while I didn't quite see that much of a jump, it's hard to get a direct apples-to-apples comparison with laptops.
Either way, as you can see above, Intel has pulled off a huge move forward in integrated graphics. Big numbers are what you want in benchmarks, yes, but as always, how that translates into an actual product you buy is what matters.
There are two useful applications for putting stronger graphics in an otherwise basic, thin-and-light laptop. First, it speeds up all types of tasks, whether that's video editing or local artificial intelligence inferencing, without having to deal with a thicker, more expensive device.
Speaking of AI, the neural processing unit (NPU) has gotten a lot less attention this time around, but it's still capable of 50 TOPS (trillions of operations per second). That's falling behind the Qualcomm Snapdragon X2's 80 TOPS—then again, the NPU hasn't proven itself to be all that exciting just yet in average laptop use. It's the GPU performance that really has the potential to change what this class of thin-and-light laptops can do.
Non-gaming Windows laptops with discrete GPUs still aren't as common as they should be, get poor battery life, and often cost too much. That has left a space for the MacBook Pro to dominate without any real competition. While it still depends largely on laptop manufacturers, they at least now have access to chips that can handle the performance and efficiency.
Gaming is the most obvious advantage of improved graphics. The laptop I tested isn't a conventional “gaming” laptop, and yet, the power of that B390 makes gaming not only possible, but actually enjoyable. The device I tested bears a lot of resemblance to the IdeaPad Pro 5i, a 16-inch laptop that had an RTX 4050 when it launched in 2024. The Core Ultra X9 388H really has room to breathe in the newer reference version I tested; its gaming performance is really impressive. Cyberpunk 2077 can hit a comfortable 55 frames per second (fps) at native medium graphics settings—and that's without any upscaling and frame generation. That's solid for a laptop not marketed for gaming at all.
When you do need higher frame rates than what this system can natively produce, such as in Marvel Rivals, Intel has XeSS upscaling, frame generation, and a low-latency mode. The Lenovo machine only got around 36 fps natively at medium graphics settings in that title, but after I turned on the XeSS 2.0 Quality setting, that jumped up to 54 fps without much of a downgrade in image quality. The combination of XeSS frame generation and low latency can push the frame rates even higher to use the full extent of this display's 120-Hz refresh rate without reducing input lag.
Here's the thing: This is a fairly large laptop. While I don't have official specs on it yet, the Lenovo reference device is around the same size as the 16-inch MacBook Pro, but the slight wedge shape makes it thicker by the hinge. It is already the size of a machine that could squeeze in a discrete graphics card, and as powerful as the Core Ultra X9 388H is, it's still a solid 25 percent behind even an older graphics card like the Nvidia RTX 4050, as well as Apple's M4 Pro.
I love the idea of not needing a dedicated gaming device to play games, and this device sells that idea best over the Lenovo reference design. But as gaming laptops get trimmer and MacBooks push forward into gaming, Intel's success here feels like less of a revelation than I thought it would. Even the top-of-the-line X9 chip is still 26 percent behind the performance of an RTX 4050 in a laptop, and that's the lowest-tier GPU from three years ago.
Presumably, we'll get thinner laptops that can make use of this chip, but we'll have to see how the performance shapes up. As of now, the main benefit you're getting here isn't performance, it's battery life. Laptops with discrete graphics generally get poorer battery life, while this larger Lenovo machine got well over 20 hours of local video playback. For the first time, it finally feels like Apple has a competitor within striking distance of its MacBook Pro—at least when it comes to not having to always make a trade between performance and battery life.
A lot of what makes the performance of these chips so important is how they were made. They're built on Intel 18A, the latest process node manufactured in the company's new fab in Arizona. The facility isn't just another chip plant. It was hailed as an attempt to bring back advanced chip manufacturing to the states, largely funded by the CHIPS Act. And don't forget an $8.9 billion investment in Intel from the US government, which gained a 10 percent equity stake in the company.
Intel 18A is also a return to form in that the previous-gen Core Ultra Series 2 was partially manufactured by TSMC. This was a big deal at the time—an admission of just how far behind Intel had fallen versus the competition, especially in battery life. While it allowed those chips to be more competitive with Apple and Qualcomm in terms of efficiency and battery life, it was a bitter pill to swallow, no doubt. Notably, they didn't move the needle in performance from the Core Ultra Series 1 chips.
The Core Ultra Series 3 reverses that water-treading trend for Intel, positioning itself well against the likes of Qualcomm and Apple. Based on the number of laptops embracing the new chips announced at CES, the company hasn't lost its dominance and remains the primary choice for Windows laptops. In that way, 18A and Core Ultra Series 3 feel like a success so far, at least in terms of delivering competitive performance in consumer laptops.
What happens in the long run is harder to say. The grand architect, former CEO Pat Gelsinger, for whom 18A was such a linchpin, is no longer at the company. The cloud AI boom is surging around Nvidia, and Intel is mostly missing out. But I do know this: Panther Lake is Intel's biggest success in years and should restore some confidence in its future.
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by Lisa Stiffler on Jan 26, 2026 at 9:20 amJanuary 26, 2026 at 9:20 am
In perhaps a matter of weeks, Bill Gates-backed TerraPower expects to receive federal permits to begin building the nuclear components of its first-of-a-kind, next-generation power plant in Wyoming.
The permits will put the company “a year ahead of anyone else,” predicted TerraPower CEO Chris Levesque. “We just keep proving that we're the leading nuclear project in the U.S.”
After being largely mothballed for decades, America's nuclear sector has kicked into hyper speed as tech giants scramble to power data centers nationwide and energy demands are spiking for commercial, residential and industrial uses.
TerraPower, which launched 20 years ago, aims to be the first in the U.S. to deliver on a new model of smaller, less expensive nuclear reactors that can be produced in three years from fabricated components — instead of the past approach of constructing giant, one-off structures that take a decade to erect.
The company is waiting for a green light from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to break ground on the crucial next phase of its demonstration plant, whose construction in Kemmerer, Wyo., began in 2024. The goal is to start splitting atoms there by the end of 2030.
TerraPower's Natrium technology features 345 megawatt nuclear devices that include a molten-salt thermal battery that increases output to 500 megawatts of power for limited periods.
The Bellevue, Wash.-based company has announced a string of new partnerships supporting its operations:
“We plan to build hundreds of Natrium reactors,” Levesque told GeekWire. “We're very focused on delivering the first one on time,” he added, and then quickly begin scaling.
TerraPower is competing against a slate of next-gen nuclear companies. Oklo was part of the announcement from Meta to support nuclear deployments, and could have a reactor operating as early as 2030 under the deal. Kairos Power is building a demonstration reactor in Tennessee in collaboration with Google that aims to come online that same year.
Last month, the U.S. Department of Energy awarded two grants supporting nuclear projects, one to the Tennessee Valley Authority to build a plant in that state and another to Holtec Government Services, which has a project in Michigan. Earlier this summer, X-energy and Amazon shared updates on a planned facility in Eastern Washington.
While TerraPower's leadership is bullish on its prospects, there are plenty of hurdles ahead. They include limited supplies of reactor fuel, ongoing concerns about nuclear reactor safety, and construction cost challenges as designs evolve and a supply chain takes shape.
Finding fuel sources: Russia was the world's only commercial producer of HALEU (high-assay, low-enriched uranium fuel, pronounced hay-lou), but that source was cut off after its 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Since then, the U.S. has restarted and been ramping up its domestic fuel production.
Levesque said the company will have what it needs for the Wyoming reactor, and is working with partners in South Africa and the U.S. to manufacture additional supplies.
Safety concerns: There are ongoing fears about the potential for a nuclear reactor to meltdown and release radioactive material, and concerns about the disposal and storage of spent fuel that remains radioactive for thousands of years.
At a recent public hearing in Olympia, Wash., regarding the potential for new nuclear facilities in the state, multiple participants cited worries about nuclear safety and environmental contamination.
Cost concerns: Research from Boston University analyzed nuclear plant construction costs going back decades, finding they were on average double the expected price tag, running nearly $2 billion over.
Levesque acknowledged the poor record, but said that as TerraPower goes into production mode, lessons learned from the demonstration project and each additional reactor will be incorporated to cut costs. He pointed to the SpaceX aerospace company as a model for that iterative approach.
But even if costs are controlled, some utility customers have expressed worries about who will pay for the deployment of the facilities and whether the projects will drive up electric bills.
The Wyoming plant was estimated in 2021 to cost about $4 billion; no updated figures have been provided. Levesque said private investments and a $2 billion federal grant mean that “we're building that project without burdening the ratepayers.”
And demand for nuclear has never been greater. “Almost any governor in the country now wants a nuclear plant,” Levesque said.
While wind and solar installations have expanded across America, electricity demand is projected to soar over the next years and decades. And while these renewable power sources are increasingly being paired with energy storage solutions such as giant batteries, nuclear is attractive for its 24/7 production capabilities.
Levesque said the company is being cautious in signing future deals, recognizing that it will be mid-2030s until it can hit its initial target of producing six reactors a year.
“We're very careful not to over promise or over commit,” he said.
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More than 450 tech workers from companies like Google, Meta, OpenAI, Amazon, and Salesforce have signed a letter urging their CEOs to call the White House and demand that United States Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) leave U.S. cities.
“For months now, Trump has sent federal agents to our cities to criminalize us, our neighbors, friends, colleagues, and family members,” reads the open letter from IceOut.Tech. “From Minneapolis to Los Angeles to Chicago, we've seen armed and masked thugs bring reckless violence, kidnapping, terror and cruelty with no end in sight.”
Minneapolis has become the focal point of a large-scale federal immigration operation, employing tactics so intense that many have characterized it as a military occupation. The operation has been marked by confrontations between federal agents and community members protesting the raids, with law enforcement indiscriminately deploying crowd control tactics, including pepper spray, tear gas, rubber bullets, and sound cannons.
“This cannot continue, and we know the tech industry can make a difference,” the letter from tech industry workers continues. “When Trump threatened to send the National Guard to San Francisco in October, tech industry leaders called the White House. It worked: Trump backed down.”
The campaign among tech workers began after ICE agents shot and killed U.S. citizen Renee Good in Minneapolis three weeks ago, and it grew over the weekend after Border Patrol agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital.
The organizers of the letter did not disclose their names, and many who signed the letter did so anonymously out of fear of retribution. TechCrunch has reached out for more information.
A number of tech leaders have already spoken out against federal actions in Minneapolis. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman said the way ICE operates is “terrible for the people,” and Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla called the current enforcement “macho ICE vigilantes running amuck empowered by a conscious-less administration.” Google DeepMind's chief scientist Jeff Dean called for “every person regardless of political affiliation” to denounce the escalation of violence. OpenAI's head of global business, James Dyett, criticized the industry's silence, posting on X that “there is far more outrage from tech leaders over a wealth tax than masked ICE agents terrorizing communities.”
Signal President Meredith Whittaker bemoaned that masked agents are “executing people in the streets and powerful leaders are openly lying to cover for them. To everyone in my industry who's ever claimed to value freedom — draw on the courage of your convictions and stand up.”
Still, many of the most powerful figures in tech leaders have not only largely stayed quiet about opposition to the Trump administration's directives, but they have actively attempted to curry favor with the president. Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg all attended during President Trump's inauguration and donated to the inauguration fund either personally or through their corporations. None have spoken out publicly about the ramping up of ICE raids.
OpenAI president Greg Brockman and his wife Anna are also prominent donors to causes and candidates associated with President Trump and have refrained from speaking out. In keeping with his anti-immigration views, Elon Musk has actively supported ICE operations, calling protestors “pure evil.”
The letter also calls on tech CEOs to cancel all company contracts with ICE — potentially an expensive demand, as several tech firms currently hold contracts with ICE. Palantir is one of ICE's most significant tech partners. Last year the company was awarded a $30 million contract to build a new AI-driven surveillance platform called “ImmigrationOS.” Last year, facial recognition company Clearview AI signed a contract to provide ICE with facial-matching technology. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Oracle also provide cloud infrastructure to the Department of Homeland Security and ICE, as well as IT services.
TechCrunch has reached out to the companies for comment.
Got a sensitive tip or confidential documents? We're reporting on the inner workings of the AI industry — from the companies shaping its future to the people impacted by their decisions. Reach out to Rebecca Bellan at rebecca.bellan@techcrunch.com or Russell Brandom at russell.brandom@techcrunch.com. For secure communication, you can contact them via Signal at @rebeccabellan.491 and @russellbrandom.49.
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by Todd Bishop on Jan 26, 2026 at 8:24 amJanuary 26, 2026 at 8:24 am
Microsoft on Monday announced Maia 200, the second generation of its custom AI chip, claiming it's the most powerful first-party silicon from any major cloud provider.
The company says Maia 200 delivers three times the performance of Amazon's latest Trainium chip on certain benchmarks, and exceeds Google's most recent tensor processing unit (TPU) on others.
The chip is already running workloads at Microsoft's data center near Des Moines, Iowa. Microsoft says Maia 200 is powering OpenAI's GPT-5.2 models, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and internal projects from its Superintelligence team. A second deployment at a data center near Phoenix is planned next.
It's part of the larger trend among cloud giants to build their own custom silicon for AI rather than rely solely on Nvidia. Google has been refining its TPUs for nearly a decade, and Amazon's Trainium line is now in its third generation, with a fourth already announced.
Microsoft first revealed its custom chip ambitions in late 2023, when it unveiled Maia 100 at its Ignite conference. Despite entering the race late, Microsoft makes the case that its tight integration between chips, AI models, and applications like Copilot gives it an edge.
The company says Maia 200 offers 30% better performance-per-dollar than its current hardware. Maia 200 also builds on the first-generation chip with a more specific focus on inference, the process of running AI models after they've been trained.
The chip competition among the cloud giants has intensified as the cost of running AI models becomes a bigger concern. Training a model is a one-time expense, but serving it to millions of users is a big ongoing expense. All three companies are betting that custom chips tuned for their own workloads will be cheaper than buying solely from Nvidia.
Microsoft is also opening the door to outside developers. The company announced a software development kit that will let AI startups and researchers optimize their models for Maia 200. Developers and academics can sign up for an early preview starting today.
University of Washington scientists and students are using AI to create real medicines.
Better treatments for cancer, autoimmune diseases, viruses and more are now on the horizon thanks to groundbreaking work with artificial intelligence from a team of scientists at the University of Washington's Institute for Protein Design. Led by Nobel Prize winner David Baker, this team of Huskies uses AI tools to create proteins — biology's building blocks — that lay the foundation for new medicines. Together, this international group of students, faculty and researchers acts as a “communal brain,” with each Husky contributing ideas and expertise from their fields. The institute's recent breakthroughs — including an antivenom for snakebites, and antibiotics that combat drug-resistant bacteria — show how this innovative science can save and change lives.
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Nvidia said on Monday it has invested $2 billion in CoreWeave to hasten the data center company's efforts to add more than 5 gigawatts of AI computing capacity by 2030.
The chipmaker, already an investor in CoreWeave, said it had bought the company's Class A shares at $87.20 per share. As part of the deal, CoreWeave and Nvidia plan to together build “AI factories” (data centers) that would use the chipmaker's products.
CoreWeave will also integrate Nvidia's products across its platform, including the new Rubin chip architecture (set to replace the current Blackwell architecture), Bluefield storage systems, as well as the chipmaker's new CPU line, Vera.
The deal is a strong show of support for CoreWeave, which has come under scrutiny over the past few months for raising billions in debt to continue building out its data center operations. The company had $18.81 billion in debt obligations as of September 2025, according to PitchBook data, and it reported revenue of $1.36 billion in the third quarter.
The company's CEO Michael Intrator has defended its business model (funding operations by raising debt with its GPUs as collateral), and has addressed concerns of circular deals in the AI industry by saying companies have to “work together” to address a “violent change in supply and demand.”
The company has managed to successfully ride the AI wave since its transition from a crypto mining company to a provider of data center services for AI training and inference. And since its IPO in March last year, it has been busy fleshing out its technology stack with a slew of acquisitions. It acquired Weights & Biases, an AI developer platform, in March, and then soon after bought reinforcement learning startup OpenPipe. In October, it agreed to acquire Marimo (an open source Jupyter notebook competitor) and Monolith, another AI company. It also recently expanded its cloud partnership with OpenAI.
The company currently counts several hyperscalers as customers, including OpenAI, Meta, and Microsoft.
As part of the deal, Nvidia will also help CoreWeave buy land and power for data centers, and work with the smaller company to include its AI software and architecture within Nvidia's reference architecture to sell to cloud businesses and enterprises.
CoreWeave's shares were up more than 15% following news of the deal.
For Nvidia, arguably the biggest benefactor and driver of the AI boom, the deal is the latest of several dozen investments in the past year as the company does its best to continue fueling the precipitous pace of investment in, and development of, the nascent technology.
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Ram is a financial and tech reporter and editor. He covered North American and European M&A, equity, regulatory news and debt markets at Reuters and Acuris Global, and has also written about travel, tourism, entertainment and books.
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Reading time 6 minutes
This story was originally published by ProPublica.
The Trump administration is planning to use artificial intelligence to write federal transportation regulations, according to U.S. Department of Transportation records and interviews with six agency staffers.
The plan was presented to DOT staff last month at a demonstration of AI's “potential to revolutionize the way we draft rulemakings,” agency attorney Daniel Cohen wrote to colleagues. The demonstration, Cohen wrote, would showcase “exciting new AI tools available to DOT rule writers to help us do our job better and faster.”
Discussion of the plan continued among agency leadership last week, according to meeting notes reviewed by ProPublica. Gregory Zerzan, the agency's general counsel, said at that meeting that President Donald Trump is “very excited about this initiative.” Zerzan seemed to suggest that the DOT was at the vanguard of a broader federal effort, calling the department the “point of the spear” and “the first agency that is fully enabled to use AI to draft rules.”
Zerzan appeared interested mainly in the quantity of regulations that AI could produce, not their quality. “We don't need the perfect rule on XYZ. We don't even need a very good rule on XYZ,” he said, according to the meeting notes. “We want good enough.” Zerzan added, “We're flooding the zone.”
These developments have alarmed some at DOT. The agency's rules touch virtually every facet of transportation safety, including regulations that keep airplanes in the sky, prevent gas pipelines from exploding and stop freight trains carrying toxic chemicals from skidding off the rails. Why, some staffers wondered, would the federal government outsource the writing of such critical standards to a nascent technology notorious for making mistakes?
The answer from the plan's boosters is simple: speed. Writing and revising complex federal regulations can take months, sometimes years. But, with DOT's version of Google Gemini, employees could generate a proposed rule in a matter of minutes or even seconds, two DOT staffers who attended the December demonstration remembered the presenter saying. In any case, most of what goes into the preambles of DOT regulatory documents is just “word salad,” one staffer recalled the presenter saying. Google Gemini can do word salad.
Zerzan reiterated the ambition to accelerate rulemaking with AI at the meeting last week. The goal is to dramatically compress the timeline in which transportation regulations are produced, such that they could go from idea to complete draft ready for review by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in just 30 days, he said. That should be possible, he said, because “it shouldn't take you more than 20 minutes to get a draft rule out of Gemini.”
The DOT plan, which has not previously been reported, represents a new front in the Trump administration's campaign to incorporate artificial intelligence into the work of the federal government. This administration is not the first to use AI; federal agencies have been gradually stitching the technology into their work for years, including to translate documents, analyze data and categorize public comments, among other uses. But the current administration has been particularly enthusiastic about the technology. Trump released multiple executive orders in support of AI last year. In April, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought circulated a memo calling for the acceleration of its use by the federal government. Three months later, the administration released an “AI Action Plan” that contained a similar directive. None of those documents, however, called explicitly for using AI to write regulations, as DOT is now planning to do.
Those plans are already in motion. The department has used AI to draft a still-unpublished Federal Aviation Administration rule, according to a DOT staffer briefed on the matter.
Skeptics say that so-called large language models such as Gemini and ChatGPT shouldn't be trusted with the complicated and consequential responsibilities of governance, given that those models are prone to error and incapable of human reasoning. But proponents see AI as a way to automate mindless tasks and wring efficiencies out of a slow-moving federal bureaucracy.
Such optimism was on display in a windowless conference room in Northern Virginia earlier this month, where federal technology officials, convened at an AI summit, discussed adopting an “AI culture” in government and “upskilling” the federal workforce to use the technology. Those federal representatives included Justin Ubert, division chief for cybersecurity and operations at DOT's Federal Transit Administration, who spoke on a panel about the Transportation Department's plans for “fast adoption” of artificial intelligence. Many people see humans as a “choke point” that slows down AI, he noted. But eventually, Ubert predicted, humans will fall back into merely an oversight role, monitoring “AI-to-AI interactions.” Ubert declined to speak to ProPublica on the record.
A similarly sanguine attitude about the potential of AI permeated the presentation at DOT in December, which was attended by more than 100 DOT employees, including division heads, high-ranking attorneys and civil servants from rulemaking offices. Brimming with enthusiasm, the presenter told them that Gemini can handle 80% to 90% of the work of writing regulations, while DOT staffers could do the rest, one attendee recalled the presenter saying.
To illustrate this, the presenter asked for a suggestion from the audience of a topic on which DOT may have to write a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, a public filing that lays out an agency's plans to introduce a new regulation or change an existing one. He then plugged the topic keywords into Gemini, which produced a document resembling a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. It appeared, however, to be missing the actual text that goes into the Code of Federal Regulations, one staffer recalled.
The presenter expressed little concern that the regulatory documents produced by AI could contain so-called hallucinations — erroneous text that is frequently generated by large language models such as Gemini — according to three people present. In any case, that's where DOT's staff would come in, he said. “It seemed like his vision of the future of rulemaking at DOT is that our jobs would be to proofread this machine product,” one employee said. “He was very excited.” (Attendees could not clearly recall the name of the lead presenter, but three said they believed it was Brian Brotsos, the agency's acting chief AI officer. Brotsos declined to comment, referring questions to the DOT press office.)
A spokesperson for the DOT did not respond to a request for comment; Cohen and Zerzan also did not respond to messages seeking comment. A Google spokesperson did not provide a comment.
The December presentation left some DOT staffers deeply skeptical. Rulemaking is intricate work, they said, requiring expertise in the subject at hand as well as in existing statutes, regulations and case law. Mistakes or oversights in DOT regulations could lead to lawsuits or even injuries and deaths in the transportation system. Some rule writers have decades of experience. But all that seemed to go ignored by the presenter, attendees said. “It seems wildly irresponsible,” said one, who, like the others, requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.
Mike Horton, DOT's former acting chief artificial intelligence officer, criticized the plan to use Gemini to write regulations, comparing it to “having a high school intern that's doing your rulemaking.” (He said the plan was not in the works when he left the agency in August.) Noting the life-or-death stakes of transportation safety regulations, Horton said the agency's leaders “want to go fast and break things, but going fast and breaking things means people are going to get hurt.”
Academics and researchers who track the use of AI in government expressed mixed opinions about the DOT plan. If agency rule writers use the technology as a sort of research assistant with plenty of supervision and transparency, it could be useful and save time. But if they cede too much responsibility to AI, that could lead to deficiencies in critical regulations and run afoul of a requirement that federal rules be built on reasoned decision-making.
“Just because these tools can produce a lot of words doesn't mean that those words add up to a high-quality government decision,” said Bridget Dooling, a professor at Ohio State University who studies administrative law. “It's so tempting to try to figure out how to use these tools, and I think it would make sense to try. But I think it should be done with a lot of skepticism.”
Ben Winters, the AI and privacy director at the Consumer Federation of America, said the plan was especially problematic given the exodus of subject-matter experts from government as a result of the administration's cuts to the federal workforce last year. DOT has had a net loss of nearly 4,000 of its 57,000 employees since Trump returned to the White House, including more than 100 attorneys, federal data shows.
Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency was a major proponent of AI adoption in government. In July, The Washington Post reported on a leaked DOGE presentation that called for using AI to eliminate half of all federal regulations, and to do so in part by having AI draft regulatory documents. “Writing is automated,” the presentation read. DOGE's AI program “automatically drafts all submission documents for attorneys to edit.” DOGE and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
The White House did not answer a question about whether the administration is planning to use AI in rulemaking at other agencies as well. Four top technology officials in the administration said they were not aware of any such plan. As for DOT's “point of the spear” claim, two of those officials expressed skepticism. “There's a lot of posturing of, ‘We want to seem like a leader in federal AI adoption,'” one said. “I think it's very much a marketing thing.”
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Employees reported major job cuts this week, just months after the video hosting site was bought by Bending Spoons.
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In last week's A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, we saw how Dunk met Egg—and the moment the hedge knight reluctantly agreed to let the peculiar bald kid serve as his squire.
We also followed Dunk's increasingly desperate quest to find someone, anyone, to vouch for him—hoping the legacy of his master, Ser Arlan of Pennytree, would be enough to get him into the tourney at Ashford Meadow.
This week, in an episode entitled “Hard Salt Beef,” well… Dunk has to level up. Big time.
Your eyeballs won't soon forget the sight of Ser Arlan of Pennytree emerging from a shack (where he's clearly just had a tryst) and taking a relaxing whizz—stark naked, his dangling manhood on display. Last week's projectile poop has nothing on this explicit visual. Does anything in Game of Thrones-adjacent history? It's deadpan. In your face. Full of pee.
This memorable moment in the past is underscored by Dunk's narration in the present. Ser Manfred Dondarrion blew him off last week, but some knight or lord must remember Ser Arlan… right?
“He had a peaceful nature. Quiet and humble,” Dunk describes. “A veteran of a hundred wars but an enemy to none. He always knew what was expected of him.”
It's a glowing reminiscence that isn't entirely supported by a flashback montage, which shows Ser Arlan was frequently very drunk and fond of singing at the top of his lungs in that state. But Dunk is genuinely earnest, and when we pull away from his memories, we see the young hedge knight is making the rounds… in vain. None of the men—House Florent, House Hayford, House Tyrell—gathered at Ashford have any recollection of his late master.
We realize that Egg has been taking in the many rejections and feels sorry that Dunk is being humiliated over and over.
He doesn't understand why Dunk puts up with it. “Why do you treat these royal lapdogs like they're your betters?” he asks. Dunk's answer: “They are my betters.”
He's still got hope that someone will remember Ser Arlan. But his quest is interrupted when trumpets sound and a group of riders, dressed in black and holding banners festooned with that familiar three-headed dragon, gallop into Ashford.
We get a close-up of Egg looking concerned. He quickly offers to head back to their camp to keep an eye on things. Distracted, Dunk agrees and sets off after the new arrivals.
They are, of course, the Targaryen contingent, led by Baelor—Hand of the King and heir to the Iron Throne. Also along are his brother, Maekar, and Maekar's son, Aerion. Only the latter two have the ice-blonde hair the family is known for, as well as that trademark surly, superior attitude.
Aerion immediately mistakes the hovering Dunk for a stable boy. Nice first impression. But that doesn't deter Dunk from mustering up the gumption to follow the elder Targaryens into the castle.
He's intending to continue his hunt for a sponsor but overhears Baelor (polite, diplomatic), Maekar (rude and blustery), and Lord Ashford (obsequious) discussing the unpleasant fact that two of Maekar's sons, Daeron and Aegon, have gone missing while making their way to the tourney.
The even-tempered Baelor is certain they'll turn up. Maekar, talking about Daeron, who was supposed to enter the lists, mutters, “I do not need to be reminded of my son's failings. He can change; he will change, gods be damned.”
Dunk chooses that moment to make his presence known—interrupting the family tension—and explains his predicament.
Baelor is, again, polite; Maekar is rude as hell. Even Ashford is snooty. But Baelor remembers Ser Arlan! In great detail, in fact!
He's as kind as Dunk is awkward (even as Maekar snorts at the hedge knight's fumblings) and suggests to the Ashford steward—the phlegmy guy we met last week; he's in charge of running the tourney—that Dunk should be allowed to enter.
Dunk puts his foot in his mouth a few times during this chat, but Baelor lets it slide. He gently reminds Dunk he can't use the Pennytree sigil since he wasn't the old man's son. He'll need to change up Ser Arlan's shield and make it his own.
We're back at the puppet show. The pretty narrator from last week, now even taller on stilts, performs as Dunk looks at her through goo-goo eyes. After the show, Dunk and Egg (Egg is also delighted by the puppet show, for more childlike reasons) approach. After she mentions she helps create the puppets, Dunk asks her if he can hire her to paint a new design on his shield.
His shaky confidence runs out when he realizes he hasn't actually thought about the design, but Egg steps in to help shape the idea: an elm tree with a shooting star above. Dunk introduces himself as “Ser Duncan the Tall,” and she reveals her name is Tanselle, adding, “The boys used to call me Tanselle Too-Tall.”
Dunk, of course, turns this into a clumsy compliment. Moments later, he asks his tiny wingman, “Was that ill-handled?”
His mortification is eased when Ser Lyonel—the good-time guy we met last week, who took quite the shine to Dunk—appears and drafts the pair into a rowdy, spontaneous game of tug-of-war. Dunk, who is as enormous as Egg is small, helps lead their side to victory.
After, Dunk wanders the makeshift village until he finds an armorer, who says he can outfit him for 800 stags. It's steep. Too steep. But he can't fight without armor. The man—Steely Pate is his name—gives off very gruff vibes, but he's not without reason. He agrees to let Dunk trade in some old armor (Ser Arlan's, no doubt) and to lower the price a little.
He also accepts Dunk's two stags (that's all he has) as a deposit, but the generosity ends there. We see Dunk reluctantly selling one of his beloved horses to make up the rest.
“Is there any measure of a fool I fail to meet?” he murmurs sadly. He promises the pony he'll buy her back if he wins.
In a somber mood, he tells Egg that maybe if he becomes a champion at Ashford, some great house will want to take him into its service. Maybe even House Targaryen. Egg doesn't think much of that plan, but the moment is interrupted when the horn blows: time to watch some opening-night jousting!
What looks to be a Tully of Riverrun sets the tone by biting the head off a fish and yelling “For the new gods… and old!” to thunderous approval; his opponent is “Prince Valaar, Baelor's son. Second in line to the throne,” Egg explains.
Then, as the crowd hushes to await the start of the joust, some jokester in the crowd screams out, “LORD ASHFORD FUCKS HIS SHEEP,” which goes over even better than the fish stunt.
Dunk hoists Egg onto his shoulders so he can see above the masses. The action is boisterous, electric, and… terrifying, at least to Dunk. Egg is hooting like he's at a pro wrestling match. But Dunk's face as he watches riders get struck down and horses collapse betrays his realization that this is what he himself will be doing once he's called into the ring. He flashes back to burying Ser Arlan, and it's a sobering moment.
By the campfire after, Egg is still amped, but Dunk is reflective. We get a lovely, thoughtful monologue as he ponders what's happened so far—and what lies ahead.
“Do great knights live in the hedges and die by the side of a muddy road? I think not.”
Ser Arlan “was a hard man to know,” Dunk admits. “He had no friends either. He lived nigh on 60 years and never was a champion. What chance do I have, truly?”
But all is not lost. There's still hope for this young hedge knight. “But he was good to me. I wasn't his family. But he kept me like we were. He raised me to be an honorable man, and all these noble lords can't even remember his name. His name was Ser Arlan of Pennytree, and I am his legacy.”
“On the morrow, we will show them what his hand has wrought.”
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms premieres new episodes Sundays on HBO and HBO Max.
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Showrunner Ira Parker explained the series' stylistic approach, which stays true to the way George R.R. Martin's novella is written.
The HBO 'Game of Thrones' spin-off pulled in nearly seven million viewers across its first three days.
Peter Claffey, Shaun Thomas, and Tanzyn Crawford talk about Dunk, Raymun, and Tanselle's connections on the new HBO ‘Game of Thrones' spin-off.
Fans have been waiting for official word on whether HBO's Stephen King adaptation from co-creators Andy Muschietti, Barbara Muschietti, and Jason Fuchs will return.
Showrunner Ira Parker weighs in on the character's murky status on the HBO 'Game of Thrones' spin-off.
The latest 'Game of Thrones' spinoff eschews the busier eras of Westeros for some peace and quiet—with some interesting ramifications for the world as we know it.
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Will this let us break free from the limitations of current silicon technology?
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Neurophos, an AI chip started based in Austin, Texas and backed by Bill Gates' Gates Frontier Fund, says that it has developed an optical processing unit (OPU) that the company claims is ten times more powerful than Nvidia's latest Vera Rubin NVL72 AI supercomputer in FP4 / INT4 compute workloads, while still consuming a similar amount of power. According to The Register, the company achieves this by using a larger matrix and a much higher clock speed.
“On chip, there is a single photonic sensor that is 1,000 by 1,000 in size,” Neurophos CEO Patrick Bowen told the publication. This is about 15 times larger than the usual 256 x 256 matrix used in most AI GPUs. Despite that, the company was able to make its optical transistor around 10,000 times smaller than what's currently available. “The equivalent of the optical transistor that you get from Silicon Photonics factories today is massive. It's like 2 mm long,” Bowen added. “You just can't fit enough of them on a chip in order to get a compute density that remotely competes with digital CMOS today.”
The company's first-generation accelerator will have "the optical equivalent" of one tensor core, at around 25 square mm in size. This pales in comparison with Nvidia's Vera Rubin chip, which is reported to have 576 tensor cores, but the difference is how Neurophos is using the photonic die. But aside from its larger 1,000 x 1,000 Matrix tile size, the startup's first OPU, which it calls the Tulkas T100, will operate at a cool 56 GHz — much higher than the 9.1 GHz world record achieved on an Intel Core i9-14900KF and the 2.6 GHz boost clock on the Nvidia RTX Pro 6000. This allows it to beat Nvidia's AI GPUs despite appearing to be underpowered on paper.
More importantly, Bowen says that it built its optical transistors using current semiconductor fabrication technologies, so it could potentially tap fabs like Intel or TSMC to mass produce them. Nevertheless, the chips are still in the testing phase and are not expected to enter volume production until 2028. It also needs to address challenges, like the need for massive amounts of vector processing units and static memory (SRAM).
Photonics is a new frontier that many companies are paying attention to. Nvidia already uses Spectrum-X Ethernet photonics switch systems in its Rubin platform, while AMD is set to develop a $280 million hub, specifically geared toward researching silicon photonics. Either way, it appears that this latest development is just a new wrinkle on the photonics frontier, and we should expect many more developments to come as the technology matures.
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Apple on Monday introduced the next version of its AirTag, which will now feature a longer Bluetooth range, a louder speaker, and improved precision-finding capabilities. The latter is powered by Apple's second-generation Ultra Wideband chip, which is also found in the iPhone 17 devices, iPhone Air, Apple Watch Series 11, and Apple Watch Ultra 3.
With Precision Finding, the new AirTag can offer haptic, visual, and audio feedback to guide users to their lost items. Now, those finding capabilities extend up to 50% farther away with the prior generation, Apple claims. The upgraded Bluetooth chip, meanwhile, also helps extend the range at which items can be located.
Notably, with this update, Precision Finding will be accessible from the Apple Watch Series 9 or later and Apple Watch Ultra 2 or later.
The device's speaker is also 50% louder than the prior generation, which means you can hear the AirTag's beep from up to two times farther away than before.
The AirTag devices will also integrate with Share Item Location, an iOS feature that allows users to temporarily share the AirTag's location with third parties. Today, 50 airlines are partnered with Apple for luggage tracking.
One thing that hasn't changed is the AirTag's price: It's still $29 for a single AirTag and $99 for a four-pack, including free personalized engraving.
First launched in 2021, AirTag quickly came to dominate the market for Bluetooth-connected lost item finders, essentially forcing previous market leaders like Tile to quickly find an exit. The company alleged that Apple was unfairly competing as its finding network was instantly as big as the iPhone install base, and Apple was pushing AirTag rivals to integrate with its own Find My app. Other companies, like Chipolo, accepted Apple's offer to work with Find My and competed against AirTag with products that work across iOS and Android, or that have different features, like rechargeable batteries.
Still, Apple's AirTag remains the one to beat, with third-party estimates suggesting that nearly 70% of trackers sold in the latter part of 2024 were AirTag devices. Apple does not disclose its AirTag sales.
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An official, boxed hardware bundle.
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The latest entry in AMD's Ryzen 9000 lineup, the 9850X3D, is set to launch in just a few days worldwide, but it seems like China will be getting a little special treatment when it does. UNIKO's Hardware has spotted an official boxed bundle containing the new X3D chip, alongside a Cooler Master cooler and V-Color RAM. The set is likely aimed at offering customers a convenient all-in-one solution.
a very nice boxvcolor x amd x coolermasteri bet that dram kit is 4800c58no diff bro no diffbilibili 喜欢就买JustBuyhttps://t.co/9Chlgymbed pic.twitter.com/5u2qtFKHv3January 26, 2026
Hardware bundles are commonplace at many retailers, especially Micro Center, which once handed out free 32 GB DDR5 kits with the purchase of a Ryzen 7000 CPU. Such unfathomable times. Anyhow, these bundles usually focus on CPU, RAM, and motherboard combos instead of throwing in a cooler. They're also not "official" in the sense that it's just the vendor's due diligence to boost sales, instead of something coming directly from the companies involved.
That's not the case here, as you can see AMD, Cooler Master, and V-Color's logo on the box, signaling this is an official collab, at least in China. It was unveiled at Cooler Master's latest press event in the region. The included cooler, therefore, is Cooler Master's Hyper 612 Apex, which costs $79.99. The RAM is a 32 GB kit of V-Color's Manta XFinity RGB DDR5-6000 that's retailing for ~$500 right now.
It launched at around $200 at the time of our original coverage in September, 2025. We've since reviewed the 64 GB 6400 MT/s kit favorably just a few days ago. Lastly, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D CPU itself has an MSRP of $500, which totals out this package to $1,080 individually, but we don't know the actual bundle's cost.
A couple of days ago, AMD said the 9850X3D doesn't require high-speed DDR5. With kits running at bone stock 4800 MT/s JEDEC spec, versus overclocked 6000 MT/s units with EXPO profiles that offer less than a 1% difference in FPS. So, there's at least some sort of silver lining with this new processor launch. Just find the absolute cheapest DDR5 you can and enjoy the best PC gaming has to offer.
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Hassam Nasir is a die-hard hardware enthusiast with years of experience as a tech editor and writer, focusing on detailed CPU comparisons and general hardware news. When he's not working, you'll find him bending tubes for his ever-evolving custom water-loop gaming rig or benchmarking the latest CPUs and GPUs just for fun.
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Give your PC a spa day
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It may be a grim time for building a new PC due to the ever-growing expense of RAM kits, SSDs, and graphics cards, but that makes it super important to look after what you've already got and keep your PC maintained and in tip-top condition. Apart from the normal tasks of cleaning out your case's dust filters, don't forget to replace the aging thermal paste on your CPU or GPU if everything starts to run a little hotter. Dropping to its lowest-ever price on Amazon, Arctic's MX-6 thermal paste (4g) is now only $5.99, down $6 from its previous $11.99 price tag. Checking the Amazon price checker CamelCamelCamel, we can see that this new $5.99 price point is an all-time low for this product.
Arctic's MX-6 thermal paste is a very popular choice for enthusiasts looking to add a premium cooling solution to their very important CPUs and GPUs. Thermal paste provides a way of getting a good thermal contact between the integrated heat spreader (IHS) of the processor and the cold plate of your cooler. A lot of coolers come with a default paste already applied, but this isn't always the best option, and temperatures of CPU operations can be improved with more heat-conductive thermal paste options.
Keep your CPU running at peak performance with an application of Arctic's MX-6 thermal paste between your CPU and chosen cooling option. Coming in a syringe applicator, it's super simple to apply the thermal paste to your CPU.
There is a new Arctic MX-7 thermal paste available, and it boasts better performance, but it's also a fair bit more expensive than this deal. Also, this particular product is available directly from Arctic via Amazon, and not a third-party reseller, so you avoid possible forgeries.
We haven't reviewed Arctic's MX-6 thermal paste, but we have tested the previous MX-4 and MX-5 products, and they both appeared high up in the benchmarking charts. Arctic's MX-6 thermal paste is our recommended pick for runner-up in the best premium thermal pastes, with Thermal Grizzly Duronaut being the top pick. The price of the Thermal Grizzly Duronaut (6g) is $19.99, which gives you an idea of how good the price on this Arctic MX-6 really is.
If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, Gaming Chair, Best Wi-Fi Routers, Best Motherboard, or CPU Deals pages.
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Stewart Bendle is a deals and coupon writer at Tom's Hardware. A firm believer in “Bang for the buck” Stewart likes to research the best prices and coupon codes for hardware and build PCs that have a great price for performance ratio.
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This is one of the worst Windows security update bugs in recent memory.
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A few Windows 11 users have been affected by a bug from the latest Windows 11 security update, which resulted in their PCs refusing to turn on. According to an AskWoody forum post, there were reports that some devices encountered an “UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME” error after installing the January 2026 Windows security update. The affected computers came up with a black screen and a message that says “Your device ran into a problem and needs a restart. You can restart.”\
This isn't the first issue that came out of Microsoft's latest Windows security update, with some PCs refusing to shut down or hibernate, and another bug resulting in Cloud-based apps, like Outlook, OneDrive, and Dropbox, not working, as reported by Windows Central. The company has since released emergency updates to address these problems, but it seems that there is no fix for the unbootable error just yet. This is also the most catastrophic error yet, and the only workaround for this is to enter the Windows Recovery Environment and uninstall the latest security patch.
These security updates are supposed to keep Windows users secure, but it seems that they're causing more harm than good at the moment. This also isn't the first time that an update wreaked havoc on the popular operating system, with the August 2025 security update breaking recovery tools on both Windows 10 and 11. Another security update in October brought another issue, with USB keyboards and mice not working in Windows Recovery Environment, meaning users cannot actually do anything to troubleshoot their PC.
It's unclear what caused the latest issue, and we're still waiting on Microsoft to release an emergency update that will fix the problem. However, this is probably easier said than done, especially given that millions of PCs with a nearly infinite number of different hardware configurations out there have Windows 11 installed. But even if only a small number of Windows 11 users are affected by this catastrophic error, it's still an issue that needs to be addressed quickly.
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With custom firmware for managing thermals.
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A budding enthusiast on Reddit has just built their own PS4 handheld by taking a PS4 Slim's motherboard and shrinking it down to be portable. They slapped a screen on top and 3D printed a custom shell that houses a battery, some controls, and even an ESP32 microcontroller running custom firmware to monitor/manage temps. The project was shared across a bunch of subreddits by u/wewillmakeitnow, including the r/handheld community:
As you can see above, the device looks like the child of a Nintendo DS and a PSP. The ergonomics leave a little to be desired, but it does look like a finished product. It features seemingly original PS4 controls ripped straight from a legit controller. There's a small screen in the bottom-right corner for monitoring power and temps, and all the controls also have LEDs embedded behind them.
This is not the first-ever PS4 handheld online, either, as YouTube is littered with project videos showcasing multiple attempts at shrinking down a PlayStation 4. One video by Restore Technique features a "PS4T" that even looks similarly boxy in its design to this one. Regardless, individual modding efforts are always worth highlighting, and this one includes a gorgeous 7-inch OLED screen, which is certainly something new.
The Reddit post is light on details, and there's no accompanying video to dissect and break down, but the OP has a somewhat rich post history. We can trace back the creation of this handheld to at least October 2025, when u/wewillmakeitnow first shared progress on the project. Even at the time, they said work on the device had started months ago, so it might've been a year-long operation at this point.
The portable PS4 Slim is inspired by Millomaker's portable Xbox 360, and just like that, this device also omits the disc drive to achieve a small footprint. The main challenge with building a handheld PS4 was cutting down the motherboard to be more compact while maintaining most of the essential features. Hence, there's an entirely new power delivery and cooling system inside.
The thermals are handled by a fan on the back, which has cut-off fuses wired to it, managed by an MCU that ensures safe temperatures. Whenever power reaches 10V, the controller will shut off power to protect the system and the battery. The OP says their goal was not just size reduction, but also "better power efficiency and thermal behavior."
The battery consists of 6x 21700 cells, each providing 6000mAh, totaling out to around 130Wh, which exceeds the 99Wh max allowed on airplanes — in case you were looking to travel with it. That translates to 2.7-3 hours of runtime under a moderate load playing lightweight games, consuming around 44W per hour. Jumping to demanding AAA titles will cut that endurance to just 1.3-1.5 hours.
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In terms of connectivity, the handheld has an HDMI port to connect it to an external display, aided by a barrel jack to ensure full power when plugged in. You can use this thing as a normal PS4 when you don't need the portability. There are 3x USB-C ports on the device, with the original DualShock 4 antennae as well, for that seamless console-like pairing.
The hobbyist says this device was a "personal engineering challenge" rather than something designed for mass production. Its shell is 3D printed using a rather dark-looking ABS plastic with a glossy finish that rivals the original PS3. One of the older posts in OP's history shows off a much more comfortable shell, so clearly there's room for improvement even if the handheld is ready and stable for now.
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Hassam Nasir is a die-hard hardware enthusiast with years of experience as a tech editor and writer, focusing on detailed CPU comparisons and general hardware news. When he's not working, you'll find him bending tubes for his ever-evolving custom water-loop gaming rig or benchmarking the latest CPUs and GPUs just for fun.
Tom's Hardware is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. Visit our corporate site.
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Open the website of one explicit deepfake generator and you'll be presented with a menu of horrors. With just a couple of clicks, it offers you the ability to convert a single photo into an eight-second explicit videoclip, inserting women into realistic-looking graphic sexual situations. “Transform any photo into a nude version with our advanced AI technology,” text on the website says.
The options for potential abuse are extensive. Among the 65 video “templates” on the website are a range of “undressing” videos where the women being depicted will remove clothing—but there are also explicit video scenes named “fuck machine deepthroat” and various “semen” videos. Each video costs a small fee to be generated; adding AI-generated audio costs more.
The website, which WIRED is not naming to limit further exposure, includes warnings saying people should only upload photos they have consent to transform with AI. It's unclear if there are any checks to enforce this.
Grok, the chatbot created by Elon Musk's companies, has been used to created thousands of nonconsensual “undressing” or “nudify” bikini images—further industrializing and normalizing the process of digital sexual harassment. But it's only the most visible—and far from the most explicit. For years, a deepfake ecosystem, comprising dozens of websites, bots, and apps, has been growing, making it easier than ever before to automate image-based sexual abuse, including the creation of child sexual abuse material (CSAM). This “nudify” ecosystem, and the harm it causes to women and girls, is likely more sophisticated than many people understand.
“It's no longer a very crude synthetic strip,” says Henry Ajder, a deepfake expert who has tracked the technology for more than half a decade. “We're talking about a much higher degree of realism of what's actually generated, but also a much broader range of functionality.” Combined, the services are likely making millions of dollars per year. “It's a societal scourge, and it's one of the worst, darkest parts of this AI revolution and synthetic media revolution that we're seeing,” he says.
Over the past year, WIRED has tracked how multiple explicit deepfake services have introduced new functionality and rapidly expanded to offer harmful video creation. Image-to-video models typically now only need one photo to generate a short clip. A WIRED review of more than 50 “deepfake” websites, which likely receive millions of views per month, shows that nearly all of them now offer explicit, high-quality video generation and often list dozens of sexual scenarios women can be depicted into.
Meanwhile, on Telegram, dozens of sexual deepfake channels and bots have regularly released new features and software updates, such as different sexual poses and positions. For instance, in June last year, one deepfake service promoted a “sex-mode,” advertising it alongside the message: “Try different clothes, your favorite poses, age, and other settings.” Another posted that “more styles” of images and videos would be coming soon and users could “create exactly what you envision with your own descriptions” using custom prompts to AI systems.
“It's not just, 'You want to undress someone.' It's like, 'Here are all these different fantasy versions of it.' It's the different poses. It's the different sexual positions,” says independent analyst Santiago Lakatos, who along with media outlet Indicator has researched how “nudify” services often use big technology company infrastructure and likely made big money in the process. “There's versions where you can make someone [appear] pregnant,” Lakatos says.
A WIRED review found more than 1.4 million accounts were signed up to 39 deepfake creation bots and channels on Telegram. After WIRED asked Telegram about the services, the company removed at least 32 of the deepfake tools. “Nonconsensual pornography—including deepfakes and the tools used to create them—is strictly prohibited under Telegram's terms of service,” a Telegram spokesperson says, adding that it removes content when it is detected and has removed 44 million pieces of content that violated its policies last year.
Lakatos says, in recent years, multiple larger “deepfake” websites have solidified their market position and now offer APIs to other people creating nonconsensual image and video generators, allowing more services to mushroom up. “They're consolidating by buying up other different websites or nudify apps. They're adding features that allow them to become infrastructure providers.”
So-called sexual deepfakes first emerged toward the end of 2017 and, at the time, required a user to have technical knowledge to create sexual imagery or videos. The widespread advances in generative AI systems of the past three years, including the availability of sophisticated open source photo and video generators, have allowed the technology to become more accessible, more realistic, and easier to use.
General deepfake videos of politicians and of conflicts around the world have been created to spread misinformation and disinformation. However, sexual deepfakes have continuously created widespread harm to women and girls. At the same time, laws to protect people have been slow to be implemented or not introduced at all.
“This ecosystem is built on the back of open-source models,” says Stephen Casper, a researcher working on AI safeguards and governance at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has documented the rise in deepfake video abuse and its role in nonconsensual intimate imagery generation. “Oftentimes it's just an open-source model that has been used to develop an app that then a user uses,” Casper says.
The victims and survivors of nonconsensual intimate imagery (NCII), including deepfakes and other nonconsensually shared media, are nearly always women. False images and nonconsensual videos cause huge harm, including harassment, humiliation, and feeling “dehumanized.” Explicit deepfakes have been used to abuse politicians, celebrities, and social media influencers in recent years. But they have also been used by men to harass colleagues and friends, and by boys in schools to create nonconsensual intimate imagery of their classmates.
“Typically, the victims or the people who are affected by this are women and children or other types of gender or sexual minorities,” says Pani Farvid, associate professor of applied psychology and founder of The SexTech Lab at The New School. “We as a society globally do not take violence against women seriously, no matter what form it comes in.”
“There's a range of these different behaviors where some [perpetrators] are more opportunistic and do not see the harm that they're creating, and it is based on how an AI tool is also presented,” Farvid says, adding some AI companion services can target people with gendered services. “For others, this is because they are in abusive rings or child abuse rings, or they are folks who are already engaging in other forms of violence, gender-based violence, or sexual violence.”
One Australian study, led by the researcher Asher Flynn, interviewed 25 creators and victims of deepfake abuse. The study concluded that a trio of factors—increasingly easy-to-use deepfake tools, the normalization of creating nonconsensual sexual images, and the minimization of harms—could impact the prevention and response to the still growing problem. Unlike the widespread public sharing that happened with nonconsensual sexual images created using Grok on X, explicit deepfakes were more likely to be shared with victims or their friends and family privately, the study found. “I just simply used the personal WhatsApp groups,” one perpetrator told the researchers. “And some of these groups had up to 50 people.”
The academic research found four primary motivations for the deepfake abuse—of 10 perpetrators they interviewed, eight identified as men. These included sextortion, causing harm to others, getting reinforcement or bonding from their peers, and curiosity about the tools and what they could do with them.
Multiple experts WIRED spoke to said many of the communities developing deepfake tools have a “cavalier” or casual attitude to the harms they cause. “There's this tendency of a certain banality of the use of this tool to create NCII or even to have access to NCII that are concerning,” says Bruna Martins dos Santos, a policy and advocacy manager at Witness, a human rights group.
For some abusers creating deepfakes, the technology is about power and control. “You just want to see what's possible,” one abuser told Flynn and fellow researchers involved in the study. “Then you have a little godlike buzz of seeing that you're capable of creating something like that.”
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Last month, Pamela Griffin and two other residents of Taylor, Texas, took to the lectern at a city council meeting to object to a data center project. But later, they sat back as council members discussed a proposed tech factory. Griffin didn't speak up against that development. No one did.
A similar contrast is repeating in communities across the US. Data centers are meeting unprecedented public resistance, with environmental costs a leading concern. More of them have been needed to power a growing appetite for AI, and they've become obvious flash points for communities worried about what automation could mean for them. However, many of the factories getting built to supply servers, electrical gear, and other parts to data centers are facing virtually no opposition.
Factories tend to create more jobs and drain fewer natural resources than data centers do, so with the exception of a few controversial chipmaking fabs in several states, they have been sailing through local hearings to get permits and tax breaks. But experts who follow supply chains say the minimal scrutiny on manufacturing projects highlights a potential new strategy for activists fighting data centers and a source of risk for communities who may be investing in a short-lived boom.
“At some point, people are going to figure out what the critical factory is that can bring all the data centers to their knees, and they will go after that,” says Andy Tsay, a Santa Clara University professor who studies global trade and reshoring.
Though targeting the supply chain could be a new way to slow data center construction, Griffin says organizers are spread too thin to take on more. So for now, the door is wide open to manufacturers to grow their US presence and feed the data center market without overwhelming resistance.
“We need to start at the bottom and get those guys that make those servers, but we first got to get people to understand what these data centers are,” Griffin says. “We need to pick our battles.”
Her focus at last month's council meeting was on opposing a proposal for a second data center in Taylor, following one being built near her home that she's suing to stop. That evening, Griffin and her fellow activists knew the council also would be considering a proposed factory for Taiwanese manufacturer Compal. But the site's potential role in supporting the data center industry wasn't obvious to them.
Griffin's case shows what communities protesting data centers are up against if they consider also challenging manufacturing projects: opacity, public perception, and the prospect of additional legal battles.
City records describe Compal's intentions as making “servers,” in addition to everything from smart home devices to automotive electronics.
It's a broad list, but Compal spokesperson Tina Chang tells WIRED the Taylor factory will be for the company's server business. The building is being leased by Compal USA Technology, a subsidiary that was established last year for the purpose of expanding Compal's server product operations in the US. Another site in nearby Georgetown, Texas, announced at the same time as the Taylor facility, will “establish a server service center supporting enterprise and cloud infrastructure needs,” according to the company.
Taylor, which is near Austin, spent over a year courting Compal, which considered alternatives globally before choosing the city. A prebuilt 366,000-square-foot facility won over the company, which said it is signing a nearly $66 million lease with plans to invest $200 million overall. “They fell in love with the openness,” Ben White, president of the Taylor Economic Development Corporation, told the city council at the December meeting. “It gave them the flexibility to do what needed to be done.”
White added that the 900 jobs Compal expects to create would make it the second to only Samsung as the largest employer in the city. Council members asked a couple of basic questions about the jobs and competing cities before unanimously approving nearly $4.4 million in tax breaks for the project. “Another home run,” mayor Dwayne Ariola said of the project.
Griffin, a retired teacher and learning center director who grew up in Taylor, says she and fellow residents deserved more transparency at the meeting about Compal's work with data centers. Even so, mounting a campaign to stop a factory would have been difficult because it could have painted her and fellow critics as anti-development.
“I don't want to be seen as trying to stop everything from coming into Taylor,” Griffin says. “I'm just trying to stop data centers from coming into city limits. If we stop the ones trying to get the jobs in, then people will turn against us and say we're trying to stop jobs.”
Masheika Allgood, founder of AllAI Consulting, which has been advising community groups that are against data centers, notes that another challenge is that the data center industry is well funded to lobby politicians and run public relations campaigns to combat opponents. Factory developers are likely in a similar position, and critics don't have the resources to fight on multiple fronts. “These are difficult, exhausting fights,” Allgood says. “So, while it would be ideal to fight on all fronts, that's too much to ask of folks.”
New or expanded factories have been pitched as necessary to keep up with growing demand and alleviate the impacts of tariffs on imports to the US. It's sensible that servers factories would want to set up near their customers, and, in the US, Texas is second only to Virginia in terms of data centers.
Cities find having both data centers and factories valuable because they balance each other out in some ways. Data centers don't create many jobs, but they generate ample property tax revenue. Factories increase employment but also the demand on public services such as roads, schools, and benefit programs, adding more costs. “Both types of projects can be very beneficial to our community as we seek to attract more good-paying jobs close to home for our residents and … reduce our reliance on residential property taxes,” says Jerrod Kingery, a spokesperson for Taylor.
Other cities are making similar determinations. Last month, Georgetown's city council unanimously approved about $1.8 million each in public support for Compal and another Taiwanese manufacturer, Pegatron, to move into town. Compal plans to service servers at a nearly 213,000 square foot space. Pegatron expects to create about 100 jobs at a 169,000 square foot factory, its first in the US.
Similar to the Compal factory in Taylor, there's little public-facing information about what, specifically, Pegatron will produce. Industry insiders speculated to Taiwan's United Daily News that the factory will mainly produce servers. In an unsigned email, Pegatron declined to comment on specific plans but said its project has “proceeded as planned.”
No members of the public spoke up about either project in Georgetown during last month's council meeting . Earlier, when the city posted on Facebook to celebrate Pegatron's plans, a few commenters raised questions about how local water, electricity, and traffic could be affected, with some conflating the factory with a data center. But after the city posted a clarification saying that “facilities like these use minimal water” and “pay for their own electricity,” only a few more comments trickled in.
Cameron Goodman, director of economic development for Georgetown, says the city has been deliberate about locating factories “in locations with appropriate roadways, water, wastewater, and electrical infrastructure” and recruiting companies that “are well suited” for those spaces.
Fabs where computer chips are produced do use large amounts of water, and activists have protested plans for new fabs in Arizona, Indiana, and New York. But concerted opposition to other links in the data center supply chain, such as factories in Texas, California, and Colorado that make electrical equipment, has been limited.
Cities welcoming those suppliers could face economic challenges if the massive buildup in AI data centers is symptomatic of a bubble that will soon pop, as some skeptics believe, and demand for servers and other parts slows. Or if data center opponents such as Griffin start to have widespread success, that could also undermine the need for more production.
But the immediate prospect of more jobs and economic growth has put longer-term concerns far in the distance, and manufacturing for data centers continues to accelerate. Compal's head of US human resources, Rick Ortiz, told the Taylor city council that the company hopes to be “part of the community for many years to come.”
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Here's Tamir's call for action https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7419994...
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I'm almost afraid to ask but how are you and everyone else?
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On the other hand, I'm currently serving in the police force (Which all able bodied men of age have to do and serve in one of the three armed forces of my country) and the bigger question since the start of the protests has been "What to do if I was put in a position against people?"Thankfully that hasn't happened yet but still there is a feeling of being stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Thankfully that hasn't happened yet but still there is a feeling of being stuck between a rock and a hard place.
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a) protests can and will be crushed by the government forces and people will be ultimately defeated;b) people have no means to force government to enable back freedoms;c) control is much easier with no internet available.Russia is on the same path by providing white-list only internet access "during Ukrainian attacks" and a bit longer every time until ultimately internet will become whitelist only.Also as we have seen specifically in russia, there is no shortage of senior software developers and network engineers truly putting in their best work to block VPNs better and deeper.Thus Iran's (and russia's) internet blackout may indeed become permanent.Update: obviously in this comment I am looking at this from the standpoint of an oppressive government.
b) people have no means to force government to enable back freedoms;c) control is much easier with no internet available.Russia is on the same path by providing white-list only internet access "during Ukrainian attacks" and a bit longer every time until ultimately internet will become whitelist only.Also as we have seen specifically in russia, there is no shortage of senior software developers and network engineers truly putting in their best work to block VPNs better and deeper.Thus Iran's (and russia's) internet blackout may indeed become permanent.Update: obviously in this comment I am looking at this from the standpoint of an oppressive government.
c) control is much easier with no internet available.Russia is on the same path by providing white-list only internet access "during Ukrainian attacks" and a bit longer every time until ultimately internet will become whitelist only.Also as we have seen specifically in russia, there is no shortage of senior software developers and network engineers truly putting in their best work to block VPNs better and deeper.Thus Iran's (and russia's) internet blackout may indeed become permanent.Update: obviously in this comment I am looking at this from the standpoint of an oppressive government.
Russia is on the same path by providing white-list only internet access "during Ukrainian attacks" and a bit longer every time until ultimately internet will become whitelist only.Also as we have seen specifically in russia, there is no shortage of senior software developers and network engineers truly putting in their best work to block VPNs better and deeper.Thus Iran's (and russia's) internet blackout may indeed become permanent.Update: obviously in this comment I am looking at this from the standpoint of an oppressive government.
Also as we have seen specifically in russia, there is no shortage of senior software developers and network engineers truly putting in their best work to block VPNs better and deeper.Thus Iran's (and russia's) internet blackout may indeed become permanent.Update: obviously in this comment I am looking at this from the standpoint of an oppressive government.
Thus Iran's (and russia's) internet blackout may indeed become permanent.Update: obviously in this comment I am looking at this from the standpoint of an oppressive government.
Update: obviously in this comment I am looking at this from the standpoint of an oppressive government.
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I mean, North Korea does manage to produce rockets and nuclear warheads. They aren't exporting technology, though.
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This is only a drawback if you think about your country's future.Which oppressive regimes do not.Thus it is an advantage, not a drawback.
Which oppressive regimes do not.Thus it is an advantage, not a drawback.
Thus it is an advantage, not a drawback.
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Those who are commuting daily to lay down flight paths for russian missiles to kill Ukrainians - those have unrestricted internet access.
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Especially now that China is taking an ever increasing share of the global information streams. Given the increased panicked the US had about tiktok. Showing the result of the western sponsored genocide in Gaza. They had to enforce ownership handover of tiktok US to a group of US based entities.So i wouldn't be surprised US internet sphere will shrink over time now that China can go on the offensive in the cyber-realm.. The components are already in place just pull the switch so cloudflare has to regulate who gets in and who gets out.
So i wouldn't be surprised US internet sphere will shrink over time now that China can go on the offensive in the cyber-realm.. The components are already in place just pull the switch so cloudflare has to regulate who gets in and who gets out.
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Hell, look at Twitter/X. It got acquired by a mental guy who was screaming about government propaganda and censorship (while doing Nazi salutes). Do you really think that if there was any government mandate to do anything like what the Russians are doing, he wouldn't have exposed it as "SEE, I TOLD YOU BIG GUBIMNT BAD!!" ?
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It's interesting you focus on "the west" when we have solid proof about e.g. Russian interference in many an election and protest via social media. From paid propagandist (e.g. Tim Pool) to the Internet Research Agency. The only factual information we have about anything remotely similar from "the west" was that research about Facebook activity in the Central African Republic being roughly 40/40/20 split between Russians, French, and actual locals. And even that isn't comparable because the French online campaign was mostly combatting Russian disinformation propaganda, not trying to bring about a coup or stoking tensions to get to a civil war.> Showing the result of the western sponsored genocide in GazaThe genocide in Gaza is not "sponsored" by the "west". US, maybe.
> Showing the result of the western sponsored genocide in GazaThe genocide in Gaza is not "sponsored" by the "west". US, maybe.
The genocide in Gaza is not "sponsored" by the "west". US, maybe.
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Well, Hamas was for decades sponsored by entire West via UNRWA while their "from the river to the sea" slogan is as clearly expressed intent to commit genocide as one can wish for.
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Spain is blocking whole blocks of internet during football matches.UK is making you "show your ID card" to jerk off.But every such country likes pointing fingers at others, "hey, our censorship is not bad, they have more of it!".edit: considering the downvotes, HN is not bothered by our censorship either
UK is making you "show your ID card" to jerk off.But every such country likes pointing fingers at others, "hey, our censorship is not bad, they have more of it!".edit: considering the downvotes, HN is not bothered by our censorship either
But every such country likes pointing fingers at others, "hey, our censorship is not bad, they have more of it!".edit: considering the downvotes, HN is not bothered by our censorship either
edit: considering the downvotes, HN is not bothered by our censorship either
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There are no ID cards in the UK, so you actually have to get a special jerking off loicense.
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Fast forward less than ten years, and here we are.
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Not physical cards, but a digital ID system is on the way :(
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No there isn't : https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3385zrrx73o
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> "Philippe Gomes, the former president of New Caledonia's government, told POLITICO the decision aimed to stop protesters from "organizing reunions and protests" through the app."[0] https://www.politico.eu/article/french-tiktok-ban-new-caledo...This is the only example I'm aware of (are there others?) of a Western government effecting internet censorship to suppress protests. (Though the article also mentions Macron considering (but rejecting) the same idea in France, to suppress protests following a police shooting. See also[1])[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36599726 ("Macron floats social media cuts during riots", 105 comments)edit: There was also an incident in San Francisco way back in 2011,[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2879546 ("San Francisco Subway Muzzles Cell Service During Protest", 113 comments)
[0] https://www.politico.eu/article/french-tiktok-ban-new-caledo...This is the only example I'm aware of (are there others?) of a Western government effecting internet censorship to suppress protests. (Though the article also mentions Macron considering (but rejecting) the same idea in France, to suppress protests following a police shooting. See also[1])[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36599726 ("Macron floats social media cuts during riots", 105 comments)edit: There was also an incident in San Francisco way back in 2011,[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2879546 ("San Francisco Subway Muzzles Cell Service During Protest", 113 comments)
This is the only example I'm aware of (are there others?) of a Western government effecting internet censorship to suppress protests. (Though the article also mentions Macron considering (but rejecting) the same idea in France, to suppress protests following a police shooting. See also[1])[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36599726 ("Macron floats social media cuts during riots", 105 comments)edit: There was also an incident in San Francisco way back in 2011,[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2879546 ("San Francisco Subway Muzzles Cell Service During Protest", 113 comments)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36599726 ("Macron floats social media cuts during riots", 105 comments)edit: There was also an incident in San Francisco way back in 2011,[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2879546 ("San Francisco Subway Muzzles Cell Service During Protest", 113 comments)
edit: There was also an incident in San Francisco way back in 2011,[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2879546 ("San Francisco Subway Muzzles Cell Service During Protest", 113 comments)
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2879546 ("San Francisco Subway Muzzles Cell Service During Protest", 113 comments)
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No, to stop the spread of targeted disinformation by foreign actors stoking those protests to turn into riots. (and if you need any proof, check out the protestors with Azeri flags, in New Caledonia. Azerbaijan's tinpot dictator hates France because France supported Armenia, so he's been trying various ways to undermine France because he's that fragile: https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/17/new-ca... )
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If you are going to post shit like that, at least get your fucking facts right.Namely that you are three weeks out of date sushine.The idea has been dropped: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3385zrrx73o
Namely that you are three weeks out of date sushine.The idea has been dropped: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3385zrrx73o
The idea has been dropped: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3385zrrx73o
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The article you linked to is about the dropped plan to require ID for permission to work in the UK.The parent commenter is referring to age verification for accessing adult content using "highly effective age-assurance systems" (such as photo ID cards, biometrics, etc.) under the Online Safety Act 2023, which is still very much in effect.
The parent commenter is referring to age verification for accessing adult content using "highly effective age-assurance systems" (such as photo ID cards, biometrics, etc.) under the Online Safety Act 2023, which is still very much in effect.
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To which I say, the people of the UK are not stupid and know what a VPN is.Its not rocket-science to bypass the ID check requirement.
Its not rocket-science to bypass the ID check requirement.
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In the Netherlands GOVERNMENT=THE PEOPLE to a rather problematic degree (if only you knew how bad things really are).If you want to start an argument "the Netherlands is just like Iran" I challenge it with 20 political parties in Parliament.
Including a pro Kremlin party lol.
If you want to start an argument "the Netherlands is just like Iran" I challenge it with 20 political parties in Parliament.
Including a pro Kremlin party lol.
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What about Russia blocking sites?As of late 2025 and early 2026, Russia has blocked numerous foreign communication, social media, and information services, restricting platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram (partially), Signal, Viber, FaceTime, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Many independent news, VPN services, and foreign websites (e.g., Chess.com) are also inaccessible
As of late 2025 and early 2026, Russia has blocked numerous foreign communication, social media, and information services, restricting platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram (partially), Signal, Viber, FaceTime, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Many independent news, VPN services, and foreign websites (e.g., Chess.com) are also inaccessible
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If we consider russia bad for doing those blocks above, then we should consider EU being bad when they do it for us.
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Of course we should not ban anything in the West.
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the end result is well... not good:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45323856
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45323856
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So, misteriously (suspicions of bribery abound) now they block full blocks of internet preventively, bringing down innocent and paying customers with them. From Law Enforcement to privatized Minority Report.Thats what people dislike. If you are a private entity and loose money to piracy, use the legal framework to solve it. Don't override it with lobbying
Thats what people dislike. If you are a private entity and loose money to piracy, use the legal framework to solve it. Don't override it with lobbying
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But EU countries should be a bastion of freedom, free speech, free access to information, democracy, human rights, rights to this, rights to that... Why do we, the EU countries have to use the same playbook? Yes, banning the whole internet is in one way worse and in other easier, than just banning a list of sites where people can find a way around it, but again, the difference is just in the quantity, the censorship factor is the same. The government gets scared people will see some other propaganda from the other side, and censors it... and even that is done very selectively (daily mail is still accessible from over here, so are fox news and cnn)With spain it's even worse, because it's not even the government doing it, but the government giving the right of censorship to a private company which clearly abuses that right and the government tolerates this... no court orders, no judges, no way to complain, no fair use, no nothing, a private company decides and the government gives them a blank stamped paper to aprove that.Yes, i know iran has it much worse, but there's nothing we can do about it here, assuming the internet is banned for iranians and they can't read this or comment here. But EU is doing the same, and we've been tolerating it for years... a site here, a site there,... not everything, but censorship is still censorship, no matter how many sites are censored, and there are people from EU here that should argue against censorship, even if it's just a few sites and not all of them.
With spain it's even worse, because it's not even the government doing it, but the government giving the right of censorship to a private company which clearly abuses that right and the government tolerates this... no court orders, no judges, no way to complain, no fair use, no nothing, a private company decides and the government gives them a blank stamped paper to aprove that.Yes, i know iran has it much worse, but there's nothing we can do about it here, assuming the internet is banned for iranians and they can't read this or comment here. But EU is doing the same, and we've been tolerating it for years... a site here, a site there,... not everything, but censorship is still censorship, no matter how many sites are censored, and there are people from EU here that should argue against censorship, even if it's just a few sites and not all of them.
Yes, i know iran has it much worse, but there's nothing we can do about it here, assuming the internet is banned for iranians and they can't read this or comment here. But EU is doing the same, and we've been tolerating it for years... a site here, a site there,... not everything, but censorship is still censorship, no matter how many sites are censored, and there are people from EU here that should argue against censorship, even if it's just a few sites and not all of them.
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You are joking: a 'coup'? The protest movement was so large, the government's attempt to crush it killed 30,000 people in 48 hours.https://time.com/7357635/more-than-30000-killed-in-iran-say-...
https://time.com/7357635/more-than-30000-killed-in-iran-say-...
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Perhaps, you prefer Arabia, UAE or Israel's internet and find it more to your liking
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that's without even talking about killing 30,000-40,000 citizens for wanting their rights> It subsidize basic needs of its poorer citizens, such as fuel, bread, housing, education and healthcare.I'd start with supplying basic needs like water and electricity.The actual subsidizing is for the IRGC which steals whatever they can get their hands on so they can be counted on to mass slaughter the people
> It subsidize basic needs of its poorer citizens, such as fuel, bread, housing, education and healthcare.I'd start with supplying basic needs like water and electricity.The actual subsidizing is for the IRGC which steals whatever they can get their hands on so they can be counted on to mass slaughter the people
I'd start with supplying basic needs like water and electricity.The actual subsidizing is for the IRGC which steals whatever they can get their hands on so they can be counted on to mass slaughter the people
The actual subsidizing is for the IRGC which steals whatever they can get their hands on so they can be counted on to mass slaughter the people
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Hold on, am I living in the wrong Iran?
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You mean the internet?
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(i don't want to make it overly political, but once again the historical materialist offshots of the revolutionary groups are the only ones who understood the betrayal and called a boycott of this referendum. Please listen to marxists when they're in a coup, they are so used to betrayal they'll see it comming)
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lmao
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Everything is the same and comparable never mind how hyperbolic. Doubt it? be showered with cherry picked micro facts that on the surface are similar.This rests on the fact that in order to establish a big picture you have to take small facts and agree on the big picture, and that leap from small and verifiable to large and analytic is the place you can inject faith and emotion
This rests on the fact that in order to establish a big picture you have to take small facts and agree on the big picture, and that leap from small and verifiable to large and analytic is the place you can inject faith and emotion
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The UK is doing some shitty stuff and a man was arrested for wearing a “Plasticine Action” t-shirt a few weeks ago, “Palestine Action” being a proscribed group in the UK, and showing support being an offence. When the mistake was realised he was released after a few hours with an apology.These things are objectively terrible, shouldn't be happening. The UK government is under popular and legal pressure to un-proscribe the group as hundreds (thousands?) have been arrested and charged.But it is not the same as someone being ‘disappeared' in South American dictatorships, where they would be taken and denied process for years if not killed outright. Yet people here drew that comparison. He was arrested for inconvenient speech! It's the same! And then I came under fire for defending the actions of the UK, having done nothing of the sort.It's really weird to watch.
These things are objectively terrible, shouldn't be happening. The UK government is under popular and legal pressure to un-proscribe the group as hundreds (thousands?) have been arrested and charged.But it is not the same as someone being ‘disappeared' in South American dictatorships, where they would be taken and denied process for years if not killed outright. Yet people here drew that comparison. He was arrested for inconvenient speech! It's the same! And then I came under fire for defending the actions of the UK, having done nothing of the sort.It's really weird to watch.
But it is not the same as someone being ‘disappeared' in South American dictatorships, where they would be taken and denied process for years if not killed outright. Yet people here drew that comparison. He was arrested for inconvenient speech! It's the same! And then I came under fire for defending the actions of the UK, having done nothing of the sort.It's really weird to watch.
It's really weird to watch.
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About 2 decades ago I read an article about how bureucracies don't even allow for humor any more, e.g. even clearly joking about having a bomb in the airport is now taboo. Something about rigid inhumane inflexible rules, in my vague memory of that article.Where airport security has to examine babies for terrorist motives, because it's written in the rules, fuck human reasoning!Heh in my own estimation arresting supporters of Palestine Action for peacefully protesting is already too close to Iranian autocracy ideal and too far from a "democratic country" ideal which the UK used to be...
Where airport security has to examine babies for terrorist motives, because it's written in the rules, fuck human reasoning!Heh in my own estimation arresting supporters of Palestine Action for peacefully protesting is already too close to Iranian autocracy ideal and too far from a "democratic country" ideal which the UK used to be...
Heh in my own estimation arresting supporters of Palestine Action for peacefully protesting is already too close to Iranian autocracy ideal and too far from a "democratic country" ideal which the UK used to be...
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It's awful that they're arresting people with “Palestine Action” t-shirts too. It's just not the same thing as actually disappearing people.That's the point of this thread, no? Things can be bad in different ways and to different degrees.If I say I don't like the way you just spoke about my sister and punch you in the gut, that's a pretty shitty thing to do.If I say I don't like the way you just spoke about my sister and cut your throat then bury your body in the forest, I would like to think we can agree that's worse.
That's the point of this thread, no? Things can be bad in different ways and to different degrees.If I say I don't like the way you just spoke about my sister and punch you in the gut, that's a pretty shitty thing to do.If I say I don't like the way you just spoke about my sister and cut your throat then bury your body in the forest, I would like to think we can agree that's worse.
If I say I don't like the way you just spoke about my sister and punch you in the gut, that's a pretty shitty thing to do.If I say I don't like the way you just spoke about my sister and cut your throat then bury your body in the forest, I would like to think we can agree that's worse.
If I say I don't like the way you just spoke about my sister and cut your throat then bury your body in the forest, I would like to think we can agree that's worse.
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The important point is, if the erosion of civil liberties continues, these governments are losing their high ground. They must stop.As in the Cold War, I would give an allowance for the West to still be preferable (modulo strict rights record) if they actually muster some sort of power to confront tyranny. But if the rulers only want cheap rhetoric wins, no.
As in the Cold War, I would give an allowance for the West to still be preferable (modulo strict rights record) if they actually muster some sort of power to confront tyranny. But if the rulers only want cheap rhetoric wins, no.
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If South American dictatorships could have their way with less blood and less noise, don't you think they would prefer that?I'm reminded of a tragicomic recent admission from Nate Silver of 538 fame. He said Disney almost never interfered in their editorial process, as if that was a good thing. What that really meant, after all, was that Disney was perfectly willing to interfere in their editorial process, but almost never felt the need to. (As you would expect. I mean, why would Disney care about political polling?)Could it similarly be that the UK government is perfectly willing to engage in brutal political suppression, but rarely has a need to? In that case maybe people are right to sound the alarm even though we haven't reached South American dictatorship levels yet.
I'm reminded of a tragicomic recent admission from Nate Silver of 538 fame. He said Disney almost never interfered in their editorial process, as if that was a good thing. What that really meant, after all, was that Disney was perfectly willing to interfere in their editorial process, but almost never felt the need to. (As you would expect. I mean, why would Disney care about political polling?)Could it similarly be that the UK government is perfectly willing to engage in brutal political suppression, but rarely has a need to? In that case maybe people are right to sound the alarm even though we haven't reached South American dictatorship levels yet.
Could it similarly be that the UK government is perfectly willing to engage in brutal political suppression, but rarely has a need to? In that case maybe people are right to sound the alarm even though we haven't reached South American dictatorship levels yet.
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It still stinks through and through of course.
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I think it's likely they will get still more scared that they won't, and ramp up the brutality accordingly.The path forward is clear: Reform gets into power, builds their own paramilitary "immigration enforcement" groups a la ICE, and you get the occasional summary execution in the streets, along with arrests based on UKs unmatched surveillance system.
The path forward is clear: Reform gets into power, builds their own paramilitary "immigration enforcement" groups a la ICE, and you get the occasional summary execution in the streets, along with arrests based on UKs unmatched surveillance system.
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And even if the man was wearing a proper "Palestine Action" shirt that'd still be pretty concerning. It is an insane stretch to say that wearing a shirt represents a matter for police action. How far the world has moved on from when the UK could be considered a forward-thinking bastion of liberalism.
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Whatever is happening in SA might be as bad, I suppose, but I don't speak Spanish or have any family connection there so I'm not going to look it up. Although if they're genocidal then they should stop too, should that need to be said.[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa's_genocide_case_a...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa's_genocide_case_a...
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If you're not aware of the history of people being disappeared by states such as Chile under Pinochet, or more broadly what it means for a state to disappear someone, that's kinda on you.Either way these are not equivalent actions.Yes, it's suppression of free speech in a chilling manner. I hate it. No, it's not the same as suppressing that speech by taking someone and holding them in a secret prison for years and/or killing them.
Either way these are not equivalent actions.Yes, it's suppression of free speech in a chilling manner. I hate it. No, it's not the same as suppressing that speech by taking someone and holding them in a secret prison for years and/or killing them.
Yes, it's suppression of free speech in a chilling manner. I hate it. No, it's not the same as suppressing that speech by taking someone and holding them in a secret prison for years and/or killing them.
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Sure. Though in the UK I give you Julian Assange - 5 years in BellMarsh, mostly in total isolation as if he was some major threat.
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I'm honestly not trying to defend any action by any state in this thread, I'm not trying to say that the UK is better than any other state. I'm not trying to make any point at all beyond using a specific example in agreeing with the comments above mine that "Everything is the same and comparable never mind how hyperbolic."But it seems to be construed as if I am, no matter how much I agree that the actions we're talking about are terrible. People come back and tell me the UK is bad and I should feel bad for defending it. I know right! And if I was I would!I must admit I find the whole thing very frustrating.
But it seems to be construed as if I am, no matter how much I agree that the actions we're talking about are terrible. People come back and tell me the UK is bad and I should feel bad for defending it. I know right! And if I was I would!I must admit I find the whole thing very frustrating.
I must admit I find the whole thing very frustrating.
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It's a mistake to take things like trial by jury, open justice ( not secret courts ), non-arbitrary detention, even regular elections for granted.I totally agree with you that the UK is not Iran and there is too much hyperbole - but at the same time the current government is trying to criminalise legitimate protest, cancelling elections and trying to remove trial by jury for a substantial set of things ( the ultimate protection against an authoritarian state ).As an example, it's very telling that the government ensured that in all the Assange legal proceedings it never went before a jury.The current government creating all these precedents, in the shadow of the prospect of a potential Reform government is something I think we should all be concerned about.
I totally agree with you that the UK is not Iran and there is too much hyperbole - but at the same time the current government is trying to criminalise legitimate protest, cancelling elections and trying to remove trial by jury for a substantial set of things ( the ultimate protection against an authoritarian state ).As an example, it's very telling that the government ensured that in all the Assange legal proceedings it never went before a jury.The current government creating all these precedents, in the shadow of the prospect of a potential Reform government is something I think we should all be concerned about.
As an example, it's very telling that the government ensured that in all the Assange legal proceedings it never went before a jury.The current government creating all these precedents, in the shadow of the prospect of a potential Reform government is something I think we should all be concerned about.
The current government creating all these precedents, in the shadow of the prospect of a potential Reform government is something I think we should all be concerned about.
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The idea that the state can deprive you of your freedom for a sentence likely to be less than 3 years without the chance to be tried before you peers, is worrying.Note is was six months before Nov 2024, it's 12 months now and they are looking to extend to 3 years! ( or more - given the word: likely ).Juries are not an administrative inconvenience or process inefficiency.The current legal reform seems to be operating on the assumption that the defendent is guilty - rather thana resumption of innocence.Better to let the guilty to go free, than imprison the innocent.
Note is was six months before Nov 2024, it's 12 months now and they are looking to extend to 3 years! ( or more - given the word: likely ).Juries are not an administrative inconvenience or process inefficiency.The current legal reform seems to be operating on the assumption that the defendent is guilty - rather thana resumption of innocence.Better to let the guilty to go free, than imprison the innocent.
Juries are not an administrative inconvenience or process inefficiency.The current legal reform seems to be operating on the assumption that the defendent is guilty - rather thana resumption of innocence.Better to let the guilty to go free, than imprison the innocent.
The current legal reform seems to be operating on the assumption that the defendent is guilty - rather thana resumption of innocence.Better to let the guilty to go free, than imprison the innocent.
Better to let the guilty to go free, than imprison the innocent.
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and that's why it is efficient propaganda
I have relatives in the UK, right now. And after this conversation I'm now more concerned for them than I was this morning, and I can make some educated guesses about why ol' mate didn't want to talk to you about Pinochet, who Wikipedia suggests died 20 years ago. Sounds like something is going on in the UK right now.I mean, seriously, I have left-wing family members who might be travelling to the UK this year. Is there some sort of guide to what political t-shirts will get them arrested?
I mean, seriously, I have left-wing family members who might be travelling to the UK this year. Is there some sort of guide to what political t-shirts will get them arrested?
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You're not being asked to feel better about the UK! If you didn't know about this stuff and you feel worse about the UK, good, you probably should!But you are being asked to see a difference in degree between: Someone speaks out about human rights abuses and murder sanctioned by the state, and is arrested, then later released with an apology.
Someone speaks out about human rights abuses and murder sanctioned by the state, and is arrested, their arrest is denied by the state and they turn up several years later in a mass grave.
You're telling me those are the same thing?> I mean, seriously, I have left-wing family members who might be travelling to the UK this year. Is there some sort of guide to what political t-shirts will get them arrested?“Palestine Action” is currently a proscribed organisation. They are proscribed because some of them are alleged to have fucked with some fighter jets and done some other illegal direct action stuff.So currently it's illegal to show support for that specific group.There are open court challenges to the whole situation, and many hundreds of people are awaiting trial for continuing to show support to the group after the proscription. The whole thing is a shitshow.But you can (AFAICT) support Palestine and Palestinian people as much as you like, you're just not allowed to wave “Palestine Action” flags or t-shirts around.
But you are being asked to see a difference in degree between: Someone speaks out about human rights abuses and murder sanctioned by the state, and is arrested, then later released with an apology.
Someone speaks out about human rights abuses and murder sanctioned by the state, and is arrested, their arrest is denied by the state and they turn up several years later in a mass grave.
You're telling me those are the same thing?> I mean, seriously, I have left-wing family members who might be travelling to the UK this year. Is there some sort of guide to what political t-shirts will get them arrested?“Palestine Action” is currently a proscribed organisation. They are proscribed because some of them are alleged to have fucked with some fighter jets and done some other illegal direct action stuff.So currently it's illegal to show support for that specific group.There are open court challenges to the whole situation, and many hundreds of people are awaiting trial for continuing to show support to the group after the proscription. The whole thing is a shitshow.But you can (AFAICT) support Palestine and Palestinian people as much as you like, you're just not allowed to wave “Palestine Action” flags or t-shirts around.
Someone speaks out about human rights abuses and murder sanctioned by the state, and is arrested, then later released with an apology.
Someone speaks out about human rights abuses and murder sanctioned by the state, and is arrested, their arrest is denied by the state and they turn up several years later in a mass grave.
You're telling me those are the same thing?> I mean, seriously, I have left-wing family members who might be travelling to the UK this year. Is there some sort of guide to what political t-shirts will get them arrested?“Palestine Action” is currently a proscribed organisation. They are proscribed because some of them are alleged to have fucked with some fighter jets and done some other illegal direct action stuff.So currently it's illegal to show support for that specific group.There are open court challenges to the whole situation, and many hundreds of people are awaiting trial for continuing to show support to the group after the proscription. The whole thing is a shitshow.But you can (AFAICT) support Palestine and Palestinian people as much as you like, you're just not allowed to wave “Palestine Action” flags or t-shirts around.
> I mean, seriously, I have left-wing family members who might be travelling to the UK this year. Is there some sort of guide to what political t-shirts will get them arrested?“Palestine Action” is currently a proscribed organisation. They are proscribed because some of them are alleged to have fucked with some fighter jets and done some other illegal direct action stuff.So currently it's illegal to show support for that specific group.There are open court challenges to the whole situation, and many hundreds of people are awaiting trial for continuing to show support to the group after the proscription. The whole thing is a shitshow.But you can (AFAICT) support Palestine and Palestinian people as much as you like, you're just not allowed to wave “Palestine Action” flags or t-shirts around.
“Palestine Action” is currently a proscribed organisation. They are proscribed because some of them are alleged to have fucked with some fighter jets and done some other illegal direct action stuff.So currently it's illegal to show support for that specific group.There are open court challenges to the whole situation, and many hundreds of people are awaiting trial for continuing to show support to the group after the proscription. The whole thing is a shitshow.But you can (AFAICT) support Palestine and Palestinian people as much as you like, you're just not allowed to wave “Palestine Action” flags or t-shirts around.
So currently it's illegal to show support for that specific group.There are open court challenges to the whole situation, and many hundreds of people are awaiting trial for continuing to show support to the group after the proscription. The whole thing is a shitshow.But you can (AFAICT) support Palestine and Palestinian people as much as you like, you're just not allowed to wave “Palestine Action” flags or t-shirts around.
There are open court challenges to the whole situation, and many hundreds of people are awaiting trial for continuing to show support to the group after the proscription. The whole thing is a shitshow.But you can (AFAICT) support Palestine and Palestinian people as much as you like, you're just not allowed to wave “Palestine Action” flags or t-shirts around.
But you can (AFAICT) support Palestine and Palestinian people as much as you like, you're just not allowed to wave “Palestine Action” flags or t-shirts around.
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I can't do anything about iran, i don't live there, neither does anyone else commenting here it seems... but many of us do live in EU, and are bothered by EU doing the same thing as iran, even if it's on a smaller scale (for now). You can't support censorship at home and then act outraged when someone else just implements more of it... even though some do, as long as the censored things are the things they personally don't like.To be fair, i'm more worried about UK, since it's a "test ground" to see how things work before the bad thing are implemented elsewhere, but either way, in my small country we have a saying, that "people should first sweep infront of their own doorways", and yeah, EU and our censorship is my doorway in this case.TLDR: if we're bothered by internet censorship, we should first stop at 'at home'.
To be fair, i'm more worried about UK, since it's a "test ground" to see how things work before the bad thing are implemented elsewhere, but either way, in my small country we have a saying, that "people should first sweep infront of their own doorways", and yeah, EU and our censorship is my doorway in this case.TLDR: if we're bothered by internet censorship, we should first stop at 'at home'.
TLDR: if we're bothered by internet censorship, we should first stop at 'at home'.
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Sure EU has some fkn horrible sides to it, such as the anonymous vote to get big stuff through when a majority should be enough as democracy depicts, but currently 2 states out of all EU states can block the big decisions...
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You also don't live in the United States, or in Israel or Palestine but folks tend to forget that it seems.But you can do something anyway which is to be aware of the atrocities committed by Iran's regime, make sure your government is aware of your opinion, you can protest outside the Iranian embassy in your country, help Iranian dissidents, help Iranians find sneaky ways to get internet access, &c.I'm not expecting anyone to do those things but I find this “I don't live there” argument continue to creep up whenever it comes to Iran but it never enters conversation when it comes to specific other countries.> TLDR: if we're bothered by internet censorship, we should first stop at 'at home'.Sure but you don't have to focus on one issue at a time. Honestly resorting Internet access in Iran is probably more important than whatever rules and things the EU is implementing because in Iran people are actually dying and you can always change the EU rules back through democratic processes.
But you can do something anyway which is to be aware of the atrocities committed by Iran's regime, make sure your government is aware of your opinion, you can protest outside the Iranian embassy in your country, help Iranian dissidents, help Iranians find sneaky ways to get internet access, &c.I'm not expecting anyone to do those things but I find this “I don't live there” argument continue to creep up whenever it comes to Iran but it never enters conversation when it comes to specific other countries.> TLDR: if we're bothered by internet censorship, we should first stop at 'at home'.Sure but you don't have to focus on one issue at a time. Honestly resorting Internet access in Iran is probably more important than whatever rules and things the EU is implementing because in Iran people are actually dying and you can always change the EU rules back through democratic processes.
I'm not expecting anyone to do those things but I find this “I don't live there” argument continue to creep up whenever it comes to Iran but it never enters conversation when it comes to specific other countries.> TLDR: if we're bothered by internet censorship, we should first stop at 'at home'.Sure but you don't have to focus on one issue at a time. Honestly resorting Internet access in Iran is probably more important than whatever rules and things the EU is implementing because in Iran people are actually dying and you can always change the EU rules back through democratic processes.
> TLDR: if we're bothered by internet censorship, we should first stop at 'at home'.Sure but you don't have to focus on one issue at a time. Honestly resorting Internet access in Iran is probably more important than whatever rules and things the EU is implementing because in Iran people are actually dying and you can always change the EU rules back through democratic processes.
Sure but you don't have to focus on one issue at a time. Honestly resorting Internet access in Iran is probably more important than whatever rules and things the EU is implementing because in Iran people are actually dying and you can always change the EU rules back through democratic processes.
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On the other hand, there are many people from EU here who need to hear it, that EU is doing the same as iran... censoring websites and more (IDs, chat control,...). Yes, maybe not at the same level, less sites are censored here, but censorship is still censorship, and the trend is going towards more control and more censorship.United states, israel (and palestine), etc. are different. Are we bothered by what israel is doing in palestine? Yes! (some of us). Can we actually do something about it? Sure... the germans can tell their government to stop selling weapons to israel [0], we can implement sanctions, tarrifs, etc. This is something that we can do "at home", something that can make some change. We did that for russia, we did that for iran, north korea etc (at various times and various levels), but we did something. We didn't really do that (at least not at scale) for isreal. US is doing that to us (EU) with tarrifs every two weeks, but we didn't really properly respond, even under the threat of an invasion on greenland.Yes, restricted internet in iran is bad, but we can't stop it. Sadly, changing back EU rules is similarly hard to do, which again, is something that should be fixed, by us, at home.[0] https://www.dw.com/en/war-in-gaza-germany-supplies-30-of-isr...
United states, israel (and palestine), etc. are different. Are we bothered by what israel is doing in palestine? Yes! (some of us). Can we actually do something about it? Sure... the germans can tell their government to stop selling weapons to israel [0], we can implement sanctions, tarrifs, etc. This is something that we can do "at home", something that can make some change. We did that for russia, we did that for iran, north korea etc (at various times and various levels), but we did something. We didn't really do that (at least not at scale) for isreal. US is doing that to us (EU) with tarrifs every two weeks, but we didn't really properly respond, even under the threat of an invasion on greenland.Yes, restricted internet in iran is bad, but we can't stop it. Sadly, changing back EU rules is similarly hard to do, which again, is something that should be fixed, by us, at home.[0] https://www.dw.com/en/war-in-gaza-germany-supplies-30-of-isr...
Yes, restricted internet in iran is bad, but we can't stop it. Sadly, changing back EU rules is similarly hard to do, which again, is something that should be fixed, by us, at home.[0] https://www.dw.com/en/war-in-gaza-germany-supplies-30-of-isr...
[0] https://www.dw.com/en/war-in-gaza-germany-supplies-30-of-isr...
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(Just a reminder that the above is what I responded to)> But what can you do for iran?You can encourage your governments to take action against Iran as well. Further sanctions, diplomatic pressure, providing support to the Iranian people, &c. In my case as an American I am encouraging my government to take the toughest action possible to stop Iran. Much of the blood of dead Palestinians can be placed at their feet too since they arm and support Hezbollah and Hamas who are doing what they can to keep killing people and keep the conflict active.Just because you personally don't know what can be done doesn't mean something can't be done, and at a minimum you can encourage your government to continue to do the things it's already doing. You don't have to know what can be done, you can leave that up to others while demanding that the Iranian regime halt its indiscriminate mass murder of Iranian civilians before they make the number of people killed in Gaza look like a warmup.Not living in Iran doesn't mean you (an EU citizen I presume) can't do anything about the actions of that regime. It's simply not a valid argument.
> But what can you do for iran?You can encourage your governments to take action against Iran as well. Further sanctions, diplomatic pressure, providing support to the Iranian people, &c. In my case as an American I am encouraging my government to take the toughest action possible to stop Iran. Much of the blood of dead Palestinians can be placed at their feet too since they arm and support Hezbollah and Hamas who are doing what they can to keep killing people and keep the conflict active.Just because you personally don't know what can be done doesn't mean something can't be done, and at a minimum you can encourage your government to continue to do the things it's already doing. You don't have to know what can be done, you can leave that up to others while demanding that the Iranian regime halt its indiscriminate mass murder of Iranian civilians before they make the number of people killed in Gaza look like a warmup.Not living in Iran doesn't mean you (an EU citizen I presume) can't do anything about the actions of that regime. It's simply not a valid argument.
You can encourage your governments to take action against Iran as well. Further sanctions, diplomatic pressure, providing support to the Iranian people, &c. In my case as an American I am encouraging my government to take the toughest action possible to stop Iran. Much of the blood of dead Palestinians can be placed at their feet too since they arm and support Hezbollah and Hamas who are doing what they can to keep killing people and keep the conflict active.Just because you personally don't know what can be done doesn't mean something can't be done, and at a minimum you can encourage your government to continue to do the things it's already doing. You don't have to know what can be done, you can leave that up to others while demanding that the Iranian regime halt its indiscriminate mass murder of Iranian civilians before they make the number of people killed in Gaza look like a warmup.Not living in Iran doesn't mean you (an EU citizen I presume) can't do anything about the actions of that regime. It's simply not a valid argument.
Just because you personally don't know what can be done doesn't mean something can't be done, and at a minimum you can encourage your government to continue to do the things it's already doing. You don't have to know what can be done, you can leave that up to others while demanding that the Iranian regime halt its indiscriminate mass murder of Iranian civilians before they make the number of people killed in Gaza look like a warmup.Not living in Iran doesn't mean you (an EU citizen I presume) can't do anything about the actions of that regime. It's simply not a valid argument.
Not living in Iran doesn't mean you (an EU citizen I presume) can't do anything about the actions of that regime. It's simply not a valid argument.
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Lets make this clear: "Spain" is not blocking, some ISP companies which have many users ask the judge for permission to block IP ranges because they are streaming football matches. The judge agrees (they don't seem to know how Cloudflare works), so the ISPs are the ones that are blocking their own users to access sites behind Cloudflare. As they have millions of users, the block feels huge, but it is not issued by the government.I am not a customer of those ISP, so my internet isn't disrupted at all during football matches. Some services, like annas-archive and torrent sites, are intermittently blocked, but you can easily avoid the blocks just by switching DNS server to 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8.
I am not a customer of those ISP, so my internet isn't disrupted at all during football matches. Some services, like annas-archive and torrent sites, are intermittently blocked, but you can easily avoid the blocks just by switching DNS server to 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8.
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Yes, technically "Spain" is not blocking. ISPs are. It is however the armed agents of "Spain", who will come and violently lock you in a tiny room if you refuse to do as you're told. If you try to resist hard enough, they will simply execute you on the spot.
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As I said, my ISP doesn't do this block. Are they defying the Spain government mandate? Are they facing penalties or prison? This is a private thing that Movistar /O2, mainly, is doing, to protect their football stream. Thes is like saying that the US government forces Disney to enforce tneir IP protection.Your last paragraph is a shame. Execute people on the spot, what the fuck are you even talking about? Spain don't even punish people torrenting or piracing unless you are profiting from it (e.g. selling pirate streams).
Your last paragraph is a shame. Execute people on the spot, what the fuck are you even talking about? Spain don't even punish people torrenting or piracing unless you are profiting from it (e.g. selling pirate streams).
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You can see right here https://www.poderjudicial.es/search/AN/openDocument/766326fb...> Are they defying the Spain government mandate?Nobody has claimed that this is a government mandate, it isn't. It's a court order, coming from the judiciary. While Americans might consider the judiciary to be a branch of the government, in Spain it is considered entirely separate.> Execute people on the spot, what the fuck are you even talking about?The police will absolutely kill you if you try to forcefully resist them when they come to arrest you for violating a court order. This is not unique to Spain, but is more of a universal principle.
> Are they defying the Spain government mandate?Nobody has claimed that this is a government mandate, it isn't. It's a court order, coming from the judiciary. While Americans might consider the judiciary to be a branch of the government, in Spain it is considered entirely separate.> Execute people on the spot, what the fuck are you even talking about?The police will absolutely kill you if you try to forcefully resist them when they come to arrest you for violating a court order. This is not unique to Spain, but is more of a universal principle.
Nobody has claimed that this is a government mandate, it isn't. It's a court order, coming from the judiciary. While Americans might consider the judiciary to be a branch of the government, in Spain it is considered entirely separate.> Execute people on the spot, what the fuck are you even talking about?The police will absolutely kill you if you try to forcefully resist them when they come to arrest you for violating a court order. This is not unique to Spain, but is more of a universal principle.
> Execute people on the spot, what the fuck are you even talking about?The police will absolutely kill you if you try to forcefully resist them when they come to arrest you for violating a court order. This is not unique to Spain, but is more of a universal principle.
The police will absolutely kill you if you try to forcefully resist them when they come to arrest you for violating a court order. This is not unique to Spain, but is more of a universal principle.
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In "normal" filtering situations, we can connect to most VPNs and do our stuff.
When blackouts like these happen, EVERYTHING is blocked. It gets almost impossible to connect to a VPN. They have advanced tech that detects and blocks all VPNS and proxies. The internet speed is also now at crawling speed so you really can't upload download anything.Also, in each blackout, people find ways to work around the censorship. And each time, they detect them and patch them. We have almost ran out of ways to prevent the censorship now.
Also, in each blackout, people find ways to work around the censorship. And each time, they detect them and patch them. We have almost ran out of ways to prevent the censorship now.
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All other platforms (instant messengers, social media, news) are massively unpopular for being horrid to use at best, and government spyware at worst.To slow down the immediate damage the government has rolled back a few of the recent restrictions, hence why I can access HN. Among Google and a handful of other basic websites. But they are obviously experimenting and trying to figure out how much censorship they can get away with. There is talk of a planned "whitelisting" of the country's internet. Where almost all but a few big important services are blocked completely. This would have the bonus effect of making circumvention using VPNs and other methods even more difficult than it already is.
To slow down the immediate damage the government has rolled back a few of the recent restrictions, hence why I can access HN. Among Google and a handful of other basic websites. But they are obviously experimenting and trying to figure out how much censorship they can get away with. There is talk of a planned "whitelisting" of the country's internet. Where almost all but a few big important services are blocked completely. This would have the bonus effect of making circumvention using VPNs and other methods even more difficult than it already is.
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I wish you all the best. Stay safe my friend.
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Can anyone recommend a good book, video course or other material to learn more about these topics?
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The way that I see it, its not just a technical problem anymore. It's about making the methods as diverse as possible and to some extent messing up the network for everyone. In other words, we should increase the cost and the collateral damage of widespread censorship. As an anecdotal data point, the network was quite tightly controlled / monitored around 2023 in Iran and nothing worked reliably. Eventually people (ab)used the network (for example the tls fragments method) to the extent that most of the useful and unrelated websites (e.g., anything behind cloudflare, most of the Hetzner IPv4 addresses, and more) stopped working or were blocked. This was an unacceptably high collateral damage for the censors (?), so they "eased" some of the restrictions. Vless and Trojan were the same at that time and didn't work or were blocked very quickly, but they started working ~reliably again until very recently.[1] https://www.petsymposium.org/foci/
[1] https://www.petsymposium.org/foci/
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Here's an overview. Be warned, the conclusion is:> We enumerate the requirements that a censorship-resistant
system must satisfy to successfully mimic another protocol and
conclude that “unobservability by imitation” is a fundamentally
flawed approach.
> We enumerate the requirements that a censorship-resistant
system must satisfy to successfully mimic another protocol and
conclude that “unobservability by imitation” is a fundamentally
flawed approach.
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Plus, the elites economic prosperity is also linked to their not being protests and for the toppling of govt to not occur and they might be willing to offset some losses to keep the average population in checkWhich sucks for the average iranian but we saw how their protests were cracked down with 20-30 THOUSAND people killed and Iran hiding bodies etc.I have heard that all shops are either shut down or running at the most minimum capacity. Economic prosperity just isn't a question now in Iran.
Which sucks for the average iranian but we saw how their protests were cracked down with 20-30 THOUSAND people killed and Iran hiding bodies etc.I have heard that all shops are either shut down or running at the most minimum capacity. Economic prosperity just isn't a question now in Iran.
I have heard that all shops are either shut down or running at the most minimum capacity. Economic prosperity just isn't a question now in Iran.
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1. The government of Iran is an oppressive, immoral dictatorship.2. Foreign intervention to try to remove it would likely result in worse outcomes, not better.
2. Foreign intervention to try to remove it would likely result in worse outcomes, not better.
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Invading Iran would be difficult, but totally destroying IRGC and military (as long as they side with the former) wouldn't be that hard. Dropping communications equipment and weapons to Iranian opposition groups wouldn't be hard either.
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They can do unconditional blocking at any moment and suddenly you can experience Internet blackout. [1]The censorship from GFW is ever evolving. See the endless cat-and-mouse games yourself. [2][3][1] https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/511[2] https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues?q=is%3Aissue+state%...[3] https://gfw.report/en/
The censorship from GFW is ever evolving. See the endless cat-and-mouse games yourself. [2][3][1] https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/511[2] https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues?q=is%3Aissue+state%...[3] https://gfw.report/en/
[1] https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/511[2] https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues?q=is%3Aissue+state%...[3] https://gfw.report/en/
[2] https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues?q=is%3Aissue+state%...[3] https://gfw.report/en/
[3] https://gfw.report/en/
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Now, if you're doing something unrelated that the administration doesn't like, you can expect VPN use to be included in the long list of charges.
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That's the standard procedure. But polices in developed areas usually treat them like antragsdelikte(no trial without a complaint).
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but even with his, i still feel angry when i want to check something on google/ins...when i dont have a realiable VPN. i remeber when we start working on golang dev, and because its under google domain so many sub sites is blocked including golang ones, its very time consuming for chinese devs to develop golang projects, you have to figure out the VPN/goproxy... stuff..
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This can be overriden to use "Starlink positioning" where the terminal ignores GPS signals and dtermines its position based on Starlink satellite signals. I think this is what is used in Ukraine where GPS is mostly jammed/spoofed to hell even far from the front.The GPS positioning is the default as it is likely more user friendly/has quicker lock in normal circumstances.Another venue of attack could be the Starlink WiFi AP included in the terminals- you could track that down.So in general:* switch the terminal to Starlink positioning* disable the Starkink terminal WiFi AP and conect by ethernet or connect an AP via ethernet with a new SSID and different MAC addressAnd it should be good to go.
The GPS positioning is the default as it is likely more user friendly/has quicker lock in normal circumstances.Another venue of attack could be the Starlink WiFi AP included in the terminals- you could track that down.So in general:* switch the terminal to Starlink positioning* disable the Starkink terminal WiFi AP and conect by ethernet or connect an AP via ethernet with a new SSID and different MAC addressAnd it should be good to go.
Another venue of attack could be the Starlink WiFi AP included in the terminals- you could track that down.So in general:* switch the terminal to Starlink positioning* disable the Starkink terminal WiFi AP and conect by ethernet or connect an AP via ethernet with a new SSID and different MAC addressAnd it should be good to go.
So in general:* switch the terminal to Starlink positioning* disable the Starkink terminal WiFi AP and conect by ethernet or connect an AP via ethernet with a new SSID and different MAC addressAnd it should be good to go.
* switch the terminal to Starlink positioning* disable the Starkink terminal WiFi AP and conect by ethernet or connect an AP via ethernet with a new SSID and different MAC addressAnd it should be good to go.
* disable the Starkink terminal WiFi AP and conect by ethernet or connect an AP via ethernet with a new SSID and different MAC addressAnd it should be good to go.
And it should be good to go.
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While that gives some ideas of how widespread the jamming is, it won't give accurate information about the range (air traffic avoids areas with jamming) of the interference or any information from places where there is no commercial air traffic (war zones, etc).
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Definitely much easier to jam. Much higher orbits for gnss satellites, much lower signal intensity.Also, starlink uses phased arrays with beamforming, effectively creating an electronically steerable directional antenna. It is harder to jam two directional antennas talking to each other, as your jammers are on the sides, where the lobes of the antenna radiation pattern are smaller.Still, we're talking about signals coming from space, so maybe it is just enough to sprinkle more jammers in an urban setting.. I'm curious as well.
Also, starlink uses phased arrays with beamforming, effectively creating an electronically steerable directional antenna. It is harder to jam two directional antennas talking to each other, as your jammers are on the sides, where the lobes of the antenna radiation pattern are smaller.Still, we're talking about signals coming from space, so maybe it is just enough to sprinkle more jammers in an urban setting.. I'm curious as well.
Still, we're talking about signals coming from space, so maybe it is just enough to sprinkle more jammers in an urban setting.. I'm curious as well.
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The components needed to build jammers and EW systems have been heavily commodified for a decade now (hell, your phone's power brick, car, and TV all have dual use components for these kinds of applications), and most regional powers have been working on compound semiconductors and offensive electronic warfare for almost a generation now.
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Iran was reported to have mobile units with a fairly short range that constantly roamed around, only hitting 2 of the 3 bands (Ku/Ka). They're also reported to have received mobile Russian military units capable of jamming all 3 (X/Ku/Ka) over a much wider area. (I'm not actually clear the extent to which X band is associated with either Starlink or Starshield. Starshield also reportedly operates to at least some extent in parts of the S band. [0])So the technology clearly exists but it doesn't seem to be something you can trivially throw together in your basement. That's quite unlike (for example) a cell phone jammer which a hobbyist can cheaply and easily assemble at home. I assume the extreme directional specificity of the antennas plays a large part in that.[0] https://www.npr.org/2025/10/17/nx-s1-5575254/spacex-starshie...
So the technology clearly exists but it doesn't seem to be something you can trivially throw together in your basement. That's quite unlike (for example) a cell phone jammer which a hobbyist can cheaply and easily assemble at home. I assume the extreme directional specificity of the antennas plays a large part in that.[0] https://www.npr.org/2025/10/17/nx-s1-5575254/spacex-starshie...
[0] https://www.npr.org/2025/10/17/nx-s1-5575254/spacex-starshie...
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They have limited service because they can't afford anything better, and the USA prevents installing additional undersea cables, but only a small number of sites are blocked by Cuba itself, such as a few Spanish language news sites run by Cuban-Americans.Many more sites are unavailable in Cuba because their USA owners refuse access to Cuba, but that's not Cuba's fault.
Many more sites are unavailable in Cuba because their USA owners refuse access to Cuba, but that's not Cuba's fault.
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https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALBA-1
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I am usually pretty isolationist in my thinking but I really wish the US would have already invaded.Millions of young Persians who are absolutely no different than you or I. It is now or never. If the regime can put down this uprising it is going to be hard to form another uprising for a long long time.
Millions of young Persians who are absolutely no different than you or I. It is now or never. If the regime can put down this uprising it is going to be hard to form another uprising for a long long time.
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After many years of heavy censorship on 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, there are a lot of accounts on Chinese BBS who say all the footage "AI generated".
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Firstly the protesters will be able to communicate in private.And secondly, Iranians will continue to be reminded of the freedoms most other Muslims enjoy: As in free speech and free trade.One of the reasons the Berlin wall fell was that East Europeans saw on TV that how prosperous Western Europe became.
And secondly, Iranians will continue to be reminded of the freedoms most other Muslims enjoy: As in free speech and free trade.One of the reasons the Berlin wall fell was that East Europeans saw on TV that how prosperous Western Europe became.
One of the reasons the Berlin wall fell was that East Europeans saw on TV that how prosperous Western Europe became.
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The citizens of Iran, in turn, are free to leave the country as they wish. In fact, the official policy is that if you don't like it here, then you are are supposed to move out.
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Granted that can't possibly cover the entire area of the country.
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Trade was a big factor though. As the collective quality of life in the East was deteriorating, efforts were made by authorities to save the dire situation by opening trade and some degree of freedom of movement with the West. As this plan failed economically, a side effect was that it only became common knowledge across society how big the gap in quality of life really was.The idea that free internet access will magically change the situation for Iranians on it's own is naive.
The idea that free internet access will magically change the situation for Iranians on it's own is naive.
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At the same time, I can see Apple caving to Iran governement - or China's - and restrict this feature to countries where it is legal.
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Imagine if all the conveniences of the internet were taken from you. Not that you'd never had them, but that you'd come to rely on them and then they were gone. Feels like some palpable oppression to me. And it has nothing to do with your political views. Everyone will feel the squeeze and nobody is gonna be dismissive about it.
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It's a desperate attempt, that really shows how cornered the administration is.Any power that fears information, has to have a highly fine grained, high level control of information to maintain power. This is absolutely difficult, in a country as culturally diverse and with a long history as Iran.
Any power that fears information, has to have a highly fine grained, high level control of information to maintain power. This is absolutely difficult, in a country as culturally diverse and with a long history as Iran.
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Right now the internet access is widening and some areas are already back to normal internet — but it hasn't been stable over the past week. https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/ir
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https://polymarket.com/event/khamenei-out-as-supreme-leader-..."In addition to the central bank, it seems as though regular Iranians are seeking the perceived safety of cryptocurrencies as unrest disrupts the country and the economy collapses."https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/01/21/iran-s-central-...
"In addition to the central bank, it seems as though regular Iranians are seeking the perceived safety of cryptocurrencies as unrest disrupts the country and the economy collapses."https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/01/21/iran-s-central-...
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/01/21/iran-s-central-...
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Like the right to not wear scarf? Seems they had the good luck with that one.
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Let me remind you that many civilians died, including two children. Don't take my word for it:The following quote can be attributed to Lama Fakih, Middle East and North Africa Director at Human Rights Watch: “Customary international humanitarian law prohibits the use of booby traps – objects that civilians are likely to be attracted to or are associated with normal civilian daily use – precisely to avoid putting civilians at grave risk and produce the devastating scenes that continue to unfold across Lebanon today. The use of an explosive device whose exact location could not be reliably known would be unlawfully indiscriminate, using a means of attack that could not be directed at a specific military target and as a result would strike military targets and civilians without distinction. A prompt and impartial investigation into the attacks should be urgently conducted.”
https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/09/18/lebanon-exploding-pagers...
The following quote can be attributed to Lama Fakih, Middle East and North Africa Director at Human Rights Watch: “Customary international humanitarian law prohibits the use of booby traps – objects that civilians are likely to be attracted to or are associated with normal civilian daily use – precisely to avoid putting civilians at grave risk and produce the devastating scenes that continue to unfold across Lebanon today. The use of an explosive device whose exact location could not be reliably known would be unlawfully indiscriminate, using a means of attack that could not be directed at a specific military target and as a result would strike military targets and civilians without distinction. A prompt and impartial investigation into the attacks should be urgently conducted.”
https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/09/18/lebanon-exploding-pagers...
“Customary international humanitarian law prohibits the use of booby traps – objects that civilians are likely to be attracted to or are associated with normal civilian daily use – precisely to avoid putting civilians at grave risk and produce the devastating scenes that continue to unfold across Lebanon today. The use of an explosive device whose exact location could not be reliably known would be unlawfully indiscriminate, using a means of attack that could not be directed at a specific military target and as a result would strike military targets and civilians without distinction. A prompt and impartial investigation into the attacks should be urgently conducted.”
https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/09/18/lebanon-exploding-pagers...
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Given the denied environment the Iranian people see themselves in. I believe its worth mentioning asynchronous networks[1].For example, they could use NNCP[2] in sneakernet style op[3].Couriers could even layer steganography techniques on top on the NNCP data going in and out on USB drives. This can all be done now, and doesn't require new circumvention research or tools.NNCPNET[4] is now active which provides email over NNCP and therefore can be done completely without internet. Once a courier gets to a location that isn't as denied, they can route it over the internet via a NNCP relay. Both for getting information out, and getting data back in.For those wanting to get information to new agencies, you should consider SecureDrop. Here[5] is a list of securedrop locations.Like all operations, please consider your OPSEC.Good luck[1] www.complete.org/asynchronous-communications/[2] www.complete.org/NNCP/[3] www.complete.org/dead-usb-drives-are-fine-building-a-reliable-sneakernet/[4] www.complete.org/nncpnet-email-network/[5] https://docs.securedrop.org/en/stable/source/source.html
For example, they could use NNCP[2] in sneakernet style op[3].Couriers could even layer steganography techniques on top on the NNCP data going in and out on USB drives. This can all be done now, and doesn't require new circumvention research or tools.NNCPNET[4] is now active which provides email over NNCP and therefore can be done completely without internet. Once a courier gets to a location that isn't as denied, they can route it over the internet via a NNCP relay. Both for getting information out, and getting data back in.For those wanting to get information to new agencies, you should consider SecureDrop. Here[5] is a list of securedrop locations.Like all operations, please consider your OPSEC.Good luck[1] www.complete.org/asynchronous-communications/[2] www.complete.org/NNCP/[3] www.complete.org/dead-usb-drives-are-fine-building-a-reliable-sneakernet/[4] www.complete.org/nncpnet-email-network/[5] https://docs.securedrop.org/en/stable/source/source.html
Couriers could even layer steganography techniques on top on the NNCP data going in and out on USB drives. This can all be done now, and doesn't require new circumvention research or tools.NNCPNET[4] is now active which provides email over NNCP and therefore can be done completely without internet. Once a courier gets to a location that isn't as denied, they can route it over the internet via a NNCP relay. Both for getting information out, and getting data back in.For those wanting to get information to new agencies, you should consider SecureDrop. Here[5] is a list of securedrop locations.Like all operations, please consider your OPSEC.Good luck[1] www.complete.org/asynchronous-communications/[2] www.complete.org/NNCP/[3] www.complete.org/dead-usb-drives-are-fine-building-a-reliable-sneakernet/[4] www.complete.org/nncpnet-email-network/[5] https://docs.securedrop.org/en/stable/source/source.html
NNCPNET[4] is now active which provides email over NNCP and therefore can be done completely without internet. Once a courier gets to a location that isn't as denied, they can route it over the internet via a NNCP relay. Both for getting information out, and getting data back in.For those wanting to get information to new agencies, you should consider SecureDrop. Here[5] is a list of securedrop locations.Like all operations, please consider your OPSEC.Good luck[1] www.complete.org/asynchronous-communications/[2] www.complete.org/NNCP/[3] www.complete.org/dead-usb-drives-are-fine-building-a-reliable-sneakernet/[4] www.complete.org/nncpnet-email-network/[5] https://docs.securedrop.org/en/stable/source/source.html
For those wanting to get information to new agencies, you should consider SecureDrop. Here[5] is a list of securedrop locations.Like all operations, please consider your OPSEC.Good luck[1] www.complete.org/asynchronous-communications/[2] www.complete.org/NNCP/[3] www.complete.org/dead-usb-drives-are-fine-building-a-reliable-sneakernet/[4] www.complete.org/nncpnet-email-network/[5] https://docs.securedrop.org/en/stable/source/source.html
Like all operations, please consider your OPSEC.Good luck[1] www.complete.org/asynchronous-communications/[2] www.complete.org/NNCP/[3] www.complete.org/dead-usb-drives-are-fine-building-a-reliable-sneakernet/[4] www.complete.org/nncpnet-email-network/[5] https://docs.securedrop.org/en/stable/source/source.html
Good luck[1] www.complete.org/asynchronous-communications/[2] www.complete.org/NNCP/[3] www.complete.org/dead-usb-drives-are-fine-building-a-reliable-sneakernet/[4] www.complete.org/nncpnet-email-network/[5] https://docs.securedrop.org/en/stable/source/source.html
[1] www.complete.org/asynchronous-communications/[2] www.complete.org/NNCP/[3] www.complete.org/dead-usb-drives-are-fine-building-a-reliable-sneakernet/[4] www.complete.org/nncpnet-email-network/[5] https://docs.securedrop.org/en/stable/source/source.html
[2] www.complete.org/NNCP/[3] www.complete.org/dead-usb-drives-are-fine-building-a-reliable-sneakernet/[4] www.complete.org/nncpnet-email-network/[5] https://docs.securedrop.org/en/stable/source/source.html
[3] www.complete.org/dead-usb-drives-are-fine-building-a-reliable-sneakernet/[4] www.complete.org/nncpnet-email-network/[5] https://docs.securedrop.org/en/stable/source/source.html
[4] www.complete.org/nncpnet-email-network/[5] https://docs.securedrop.org/en/stable/source/source.html
[5] https://docs.securedrop.org/en/stable/source/source.html
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I am hoping more tools will be built on top of it, with good tolerance for asynchronous/offline networks, particularly for communication and social. We may need it soon elsewhere.Mail over NNCP works well as you mentioned because mail is already asynchronous. Maybe Delta Chat over NNCP is worth a try.
Mail over NNCP works well as you mentioned because mail is already asynchronous. Maybe Delta Chat over NNCP is worth a try.
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> Astroturfing much?I have been involved in antiregime activities for years. You can easily find many posts of mine evangelizing the cause in the oddest places e.g.: https://www.themotte.org/post/2196/culture-war-roundup-for-t...> I just want the regime to changeI run one of the biggest defense forums where I post about it a lot: https://www.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/1q09y6q/ac...
I have been involved in antiregime activities for years. You can easily find many posts of mine evangelizing the cause in the oddest places e.g.: https://www.themotte.org/post/2196/culture-war-roundup-for-t...> I just want the regime to changeI run one of the biggest defense forums where I post about it a lot: https://www.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/1q09y6q/ac...
> I just want the regime to changeI run one of the biggest defense forums where I post about it a lot: https://www.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/1q09y6q/ac...
I run one of the biggest defense forums where I post about it a lot: https://www.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/1q09y6q/ac...
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[1] https://x.com/netblocks/status/2015695423000756250?s=20
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You could try to bifurcate into allied and non allied, but even that would be flawed, especially in countries like the USA where it becomes a first amendment right to try to ban such connectivity. It's very hard to kill the Internet in terms of connecting peers - that's kind of the point of its design.
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Is the idea to unblock their internet if they let everyone use the internet and not just the elite? It won't work. Their elites will find workarounds and they'll leave the internet completely blocked apart from that.
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You do understand what's happening in Iran, right? Hard to take your comment seriously.
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Even with ublock Origin, these corporations will build a profile on me. Not so in Iran, where people can live without the watchful eye of Google looking at everything they do.
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I'm sorry but how tone-deaf can someone be? Over 12.000 people have been killed in the protests with some reports going up to 30.000 since then and here you are happy about the fact that Google cannot profile them anymore. Protesters are beeing shot on-masse in the streets and families from outside the country have no ideas if their brothers and sisters are even still alive. Have some decency.
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While you're at it, you can try explaining Ukranians why it's fine that Russia is invading them because America is bad.
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Because I guess you're not interested in my own personal experience of witnessing said people get killed either. Or not exiting my home because I feared for my life. But you seem to have a loose definition of "unconfirmed" [1] so I won't dwell on that. Here's all I have to say:> When the Israeli government claims that Iran needs to be toppled to protect the Iranian people, while they simultaneously commit genocide in Palestine, I have to stop and think about their real motives.The Iranian government is evil.The Israeli government is evil.Both are, believe it or not, true. Conservative ruling systems often dislike other conservative ruling systems.> Trump wants to bring democracy to Iran_Iranians_ want to bring democracy to Iran. And as one of them, I sincerely don't give a shit about what Trump or Israel or anyone else outside of this fucking country wants.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_massacres
> When the Israeli government claims that Iran needs to be toppled to protect the Iranian people, while they simultaneously commit genocide in Palestine, I have to stop and think about their real motives.The Iranian government is evil.The Israeli government is evil.Both are, believe it or not, true. Conservative ruling systems often dislike other conservative ruling systems.> Trump wants to bring democracy to Iran_Iranians_ want to bring democracy to Iran. And as one of them, I sincerely don't give a shit about what Trump or Israel or anyone else outside of this fucking country wants.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_massacres
The Iranian government is evil.The Israeli government is evil.Both are, believe it or not, true. Conservative ruling systems often dislike other conservative ruling systems.> Trump wants to bring democracy to Iran_Iranians_ want to bring democracy to Iran. And as one of them, I sincerely don't give a shit about what Trump or Israel or anyone else outside of this fucking country wants.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_massacres
The Israeli government is evil.Both are, believe it or not, true. Conservative ruling systems often dislike other conservative ruling systems.> Trump wants to bring democracy to Iran_Iranians_ want to bring democracy to Iran. And as one of them, I sincerely don't give a shit about what Trump or Israel or anyone else outside of this fucking country wants.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_massacres
Both are, believe it or not, true. Conservative ruling systems often dislike other conservative ruling systems.> Trump wants to bring democracy to Iran_Iranians_ want to bring democracy to Iran. And as one of them, I sincerely don't give a shit about what Trump or Israel or anyone else outside of this fucking country wants.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_massacres
> Trump wants to bring democracy to Iran_Iranians_ want to bring democracy to Iran. And as one of them, I sincerely don't give a shit about what Trump or Israel or anyone else outside of this fucking country wants.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_massacres
_Iranians_ want to bring democracy to Iran. And as one of them, I sincerely don't give a shit about what Trump or Israel or anyone else outside of this fucking country wants.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_massacres
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_massacres
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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/israel-hamas-i...Interestingly, during the last internet blackout in Iran, a lot of the pro Scottish independence X accounts went quiet too:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_influence_operations_i...I'm sure many Iranians are deeply concerned about that cause.
Interestingly, during the last internet blackout in Iran, a lot of the pro Scottish independence X accounts went quiet too:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_influence_operations_i...I'm sure many Iranians are deeply concerned about that cause.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_influence_operations_i...I'm sure many Iranians are deeply concerned about that cause.
I'm sure many Iranians are deeply concerned about that cause.
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The Scottish independence movement is a very strong, grass roots campaign that has been building for many decades ( pre-web never mind pre-twitter ), with the Scottish ambivalence to the Union having deep cultural roots.What keeps Gaza and the wider actions of the current Israel government in the news is the constant killings and injustices. If they didn't want to be in the news perhaps they could stop killing people.Next you will be telling me Minnesota is only in the news due to Russia bots - and nothing to do with the killing of civilians on the streets.
What keeps Gaza and the wider actions of the current Israel government in the news is the constant killings and injustices. If they didn't want to be in the news perhaps they could stop killing people.Next you will be telling me Minnesota is only in the news due to Russia bots - and nothing to do with the killing of civilians on the streets.
Next you will be telling me Minnesota is only in the news due to Russia bots - and nothing to do with the killing of civilians on the streets.
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I am saying that there is evidence that the amount of media (and I am including X/Twitter and other social media) attention given to various causes around the world is actively manipulated. This is in response to a comment querying the perceived disparity in media coverage of events. Not that these events are or are not occurring or a more 'worthy' cause than one another.I very much understand the history around Scottish independence, but unfortunately it will take me a lot of convincing to genuinely believe that twitter accounts in Iran sharing news that Balmoral castle has been taken over by protestors [1] are well meaning.[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260117184736/https://www.teleg...
I very much understand the history around Scottish independence, but unfortunately it will take me a lot of convincing to genuinely believe that twitter accounts in Iran sharing news that Balmoral castle has been taken over by protestors [1] are well meaning.[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260117184736/https://www.teleg...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260117184736/https://www.teleg...
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If you don't believe Iranian tweets are a major factor in Scottish independence - then why mention it?And while I agree there is a lot of media manipulation attempts out there - I'd argue, if you take your Iran/Israel issue as an example - do you truely believe that Iran is outgunning Israel in this regard??In terms of coverage - did this incident gget much coverage? https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260125-israeli-forces-ki...In the 848 days since Oct 2023, 1109 people have been killed within the occupied terrorities by Israeli government forces or settlers.That's more than 1 a day. Are you arguing that has disproportionate coverage?I'd argue it hardly gets a mention.
And while I agree there is a lot of media manipulation attempts out there - I'd argue, if you take your Iran/Israel issue as an example - do you truely believe that Iran is outgunning Israel in this regard??In terms of coverage - did this incident gget much coverage? https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260125-israeli-forces-ki...In the 848 days since Oct 2023, 1109 people have been killed within the occupied terrorities by Israeli government forces or settlers.That's more than 1 a day. Are you arguing that has disproportionate coverage?I'd argue it hardly gets a mention.
In terms of coverage - did this incident gget much coverage? https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260125-israeli-forces-ki...In the 848 days since Oct 2023, 1109 people have been killed within the occupied terrorities by Israeli government forces or settlers.That's more than 1 a day. Are you arguing that has disproportionate coverage?I'd argue it hardly gets a mention.
In the 848 days since Oct 2023, 1109 people have been killed within the occupied terrorities by Israeli government forces or settlers.That's more than 1 a day. Are you arguing that has disproportionate coverage?I'd argue it hardly gets a mention.
That's more than 1 a day. Are you arguing that has disproportionate coverage?I'd argue it hardly gets a mention.
I'd argue it hardly gets a mention.
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With that said, I would argue there is a huge difference between those you have mentioned in how they deal with protests.To make my point clearer, I have an idea for you: In each of the countries you mentioned, go to the capital with a sign "I am against this regime, I want change" and see what happens.
To make my point clearer, I have an idea for you: In each of the countries you mentioned, go to the capital with a sign "I am against this regime, I want change" and see what happens.
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Nice try, but no. The main difference will be how much coverage your arrest will receive, depending on who arrests you and who covers the story.[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2025/04/12/politics/trump-krebs-khal...[2] https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024-04-26/ty-article-opinio...
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2025/04/12/politics/trump-krebs-khal...[2] https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024-04-26/ty-article-opinio...
[2] https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024-04-26/ty-article-opinio...
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0.03% of Iranians vs 3% of Gazans.I think we can all agree that Iran shouldn't be massacring its own nationals even if as the government claims they are foreign-influenced, but don't use this as a platform to push an agenda that harms even your own cause.
I think we can all agree that Iran shouldn't be massacring its own nationals even if as the government claims they are foreign-influenced, but don't use this as a platform to push an agenda that harms even your own cause.
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It's 30k in a week - all civilians vs 60k in 2 years - in a mixture of civilians and combatants.
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>0.03% of Iranians vs 3% of Gazans."One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic"
"One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic"
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Sure, they all had moms and dads and to their families they were likely important and missed but there is a World of difference to the people left behind between some activist no one knows getting murdered by the state and their own families and acquaintances getting mowed down while they themselves are living precariously.This moral absolutism is relativism in disguise.edit: sorry, I shouldn't have replied to a political post however egregious. I will not engage further.
This moral absolutism is relativism in disguise.edit: sorry, I shouldn't have replied to a political post however egregious. I will not engage further.
edit: sorry, I shouldn't have replied to a political post however egregious. I will not engage further.
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The Israeli's demand was returning the hostages and the bodies of the people Hamas murdered. Hamas refused to do that for a year and a half.
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lmao, every. single. time.
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However, if someone pick and chooses where to apply human rights, it's unethical to say the least.
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Given the direct comparison and language of the parent comment, it's hard for me not to see an implied agenda here: Iran's regime is bad, they're islamists, just like Hamas, therefore Israel should be excused for having turned Gaza into a parking lot, or something along these lines. Our commitment to human rights should be strong enough to reject this sort of thinking and condemn every single one of these civilian deaths.
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George Floyd got a lot because he was a borderline case, an innocent man shot by police for some, a criminal who got what he deserved for others. That creates tension. That creates arguments. "local cop shoots innocent 80-year-old woman carrying groceries" is a story for a day at best, then the cop gets punished and we move on.Gaza is the same. You have one side complaining about human rights abuses, and the pro-Israel side supporting Israle to the death. In Iran, there's no such tension, we all agree that this is bad, shrug and move on.[1] (funnily enough, this was cited today on HN in an entirely unrelated article) https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...
Gaza is the same. You have one side complaining about human rights abuses, and the pro-Israel side supporting Israle to the death. In Iran, there's no such tension, we all agree that this is bad, shrug and move on.[1] (funnily enough, this was cited today on HN in an entirely unrelated article) https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...
[1] (funnily enough, this was cited today on HN in an entirely unrelated article) https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...
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She said, "well, how would I know about it if it's not on the news?"I said, "well, it was on the news." And then I went looking for articles about it. And y'know, I realized that unless you actually went looking, you probably wouldn't find those articles, even though they're only a few weeks old.What is super disappointing about this is that when the US does take action against the Iranian regime again, the reasoning is not going to be legible to most Americans. I don't really understand how this was erased so quickly. That meme about Columbia's campus being totally protest-free was pretty much on point. It's startling to see a large portion of the population being manipulated so thoroughly into being rabid about one thing and totally blind to another at the same time. Is having consistent values no longer a value?
I said, "well, it was on the news." And then I went looking for articles about it. And y'know, I realized that unless you actually went looking, you probably wouldn't find those articles, even though they're only a few weeks old.What is super disappointing about this is that when the US does take action against the Iranian regime again, the reasoning is not going to be legible to most Americans. I don't really understand how this was erased so quickly. That meme about Columbia's campus being totally protest-free was pretty much on point. It's startling to see a large portion of the population being manipulated so thoroughly into being rabid about one thing and totally blind to another at the same time. Is having consistent values no longer a value?
What is super disappointing about this is that when the US does take action against the Iranian regime again, the reasoning is not going to be legible to most Americans. I don't really understand how this was erased so quickly. That meme about Columbia's campus being totally protest-free was pretty much on point. It's startling to see a large portion of the population being manipulated so thoroughly into being rabid about one thing and totally blind to another at the same time. Is having consistent values no longer a value?
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> Weeks after it was exposed that Hamas' so-called “Gaza Health Ministry” has been circulating false casualty figures, much of the media are still reporting them without a hint of skepticism.> In April, research by Salo Aizenberg, a board member of HonestReporting, revealed that thousands of previously “identified” deaths — including more than 1,000 children allegedly killed in Israeli airstrikes — had quietly disappeared from Hamas' own tallies.> Aizenberg's findings echoed a December report by the Henry Jackson Society, which documented how Hamas had systematically inflated civilian casualty numbers to suggest that Israel targets non-combatants.
> In April, research by Salo Aizenberg, a board member of HonestReporting, revealed that thousands of previously “identified” deaths — including more than 1,000 children allegedly killed in Israeli airstrikes — had quietly disappeared from Hamas' own tallies.> Aizenberg's findings echoed a December report by the Henry Jackson Society, which documented how Hamas had systematically inflated civilian casualty numbers to suggest that Israel targets non-combatants.
> Aizenberg's findings echoed a December report by the Henry Jackson Society, which documented how Hamas had systematically inflated civilian casualty numbers to suggest that Israel targets non-combatants.
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Also noted, re: the two sources cited:* In November 2024, Honest Reporting Canada's assistant director, Robert Walker, was criminally charged with 17 counts of mischief for allegedly vandalizing several properties in a Toronto neighborhood by spray painting anti-Palestinian graffiti.~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HonestReportingand* (Henry Jackson Society) Co-founder Matthew Jamison, who now works for YouGov, wrote in 2017 that he was ashamed of his involvement, having never imagined the Henry Jackson Society "would become a far-right, deeply anti-Muslim racist ... propaganda outfit to smear other cultures, religions and ethnic groups". He claimed that "The HJS for many years has relentlessly demonised Muslims and Islam".~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Jackson_Society
* In November 2024, Honest Reporting Canada's assistant director, Robert Walker, was criminally charged with 17 counts of mischief for allegedly vandalizing several properties in a Toronto neighborhood by spray painting anti-Palestinian graffiti.~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HonestReportingand* (Henry Jackson Society) Co-founder Matthew Jamison, who now works for YouGov, wrote in 2017 that he was ashamed of his involvement, having never imagined the Henry Jackson Society "would become a far-right, deeply anti-Muslim racist ... propaganda outfit to smear other cultures, religions and ethnic groups". He claimed that "The HJS for many years has relentlessly demonised Muslims and Islam".~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Jackson_Society
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HonestReportingand* (Henry Jackson Society) Co-founder Matthew Jamison, who now works for YouGov, wrote in 2017 that he was ashamed of his involvement, having never imagined the Henry Jackson Society "would become a far-right, deeply anti-Muslim racist ... propaganda outfit to smear other cultures, religions and ethnic groups". He claimed that "The HJS for many years has relentlessly demonised Muslims and Islam".~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Jackson_Society
and* (Henry Jackson Society) Co-founder Matthew Jamison, who now works for YouGov, wrote in 2017 that he was ashamed of his involvement, having never imagined the Henry Jackson Society "would become a far-right, deeply anti-Muslim racist ... propaganda outfit to smear other cultures, religions and ethnic groups". He claimed that "The HJS for many years has relentlessly demonised Muslims and Islam".~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Jackson_Society
* (Henry Jackson Society) Co-founder Matthew Jamison, who now works for YouGov, wrote in 2017 that he was ashamed of his involvement, having never imagined the Henry Jackson Society "would become a far-right, deeply anti-Muslim racist ... propaganda outfit to smear other cultures, religions and ethnic groups". He claimed that "The HJS for many years has relentlessly demonised Muslims and Islam".~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Jackson_Society
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Jackson_Society
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Anything coming from Hamas is certainly not trustworthy, but according to the ICJ, there were quite a few more indications that Israel did this. Just the blocking of food alone is proof of targeting non combatants.
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This goes both ways and applies to all conflicts, but somehow we always cherry-pick the source that is not aligned with western interests as the "untrustworthy".
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I "cherry-pick" sources that do not spread lies. That excludes Hamas, as well as the circle around Netanjahu. The ICJ seems more interested in truth and you may criticize how that went for them, or are they anti western in your book?
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I don't claim the bias was deliberate. The point is that we have internalized having to conform with the narrative of western (elite) interests, which in this case is to exert control on the region, resources and trade routes.
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I think this comment is misguided enough / detached from reality enough to rightfully be flagged to death for being trite and not contributing anything to the discussion.Iranians lost internet than 3 weeks ago. They are as aware now as they ever will be about how things are going outside their borders.
Iranians lost internet than 3 weeks ago. They are as aware now as they ever will be about how things are going outside their borders.
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This is factually incorrect. Top 10 majority-Muslim countries, sorted by population:Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey, Algeria, Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Morocco, Saudi ArabiaNow, the majority of those have problems with seeds in Western Imperialism, but the point is (a) the majority of those have problems (b) Iran's problems also have seeds in US interventions.The gap between how peaceful and educated most people are, and how bad governments are, is a phenomenon almost unique here. Figuring out how to bridge that gap is the major challenge. The trick would be establishing a collective caliphate -- where the caliph isn't an individual but an institution -- and which spans the Muslim world.
Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey, Algeria, Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Morocco, Saudi ArabiaNow, the majority of those have problems with seeds in Western Imperialism, but the point is (a) the majority of those have problems (b) Iran's problems also have seeds in US interventions.The gap between how peaceful and educated most people are, and how bad governments are, is a phenomenon almost unique here. Figuring out how to bridge that gap is the major challenge. The trick would be establishing a collective caliphate -- where the caliph isn't an individual but an institution -- and which spans the Muslim world.
Now, the majority of those have problems with seeds in Western Imperialism, but the point is (a) the majority of those have problems (b) Iran's problems also have seeds in US interventions.The gap between how peaceful and educated most people are, and how bad governments are, is a phenomenon almost unique here. Figuring out how to bridge that gap is the major challenge. The trick would be establishing a collective caliphate -- where the caliph isn't an individual but an institution -- and which spans the Muslim world.
The gap between how peaceful and educated most people are, and how bad governments are, is a phenomenon almost unique here. Figuring out how to bridge that gap is the major challenge. The trick would be establishing a collective caliphate -- where the caliph isn't an individual but an institution -- and which spans the Muslim world.
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Which coutries are those?
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UAE directly finances the sanguinary RSF in Sudan and CTS in Yemen, Saudi Arabia/Qatar has financed institutions behind the expansion of the Muslim Brotherhood/Salafism in the worlld and Turkey has a shaky economy with a large underbelly as well as engaging in their own brand of imperialism abroad.
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The rhetoric that Sweden, Germany, UK and France are Muslim countries is exclusivley used by very far-right standing people to fearmonger and hate against immigrants. What would it even mean for these countries to be Muslim? Germany has literally a party with "Christian" in their name in the government. You still hear the bells of Christian churches everywhere.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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It's one thing to accuse someone of not replying to the "strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says", and another thing to accuse someone of "hate", which is a very serious accusation that requires proof beyond a shadow of a doubt, especially in the EU where strong anti libel laws apply.
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>" Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."If you had a strong plausible interpretation you'd have given one.
If you had a strong plausible interpretation you'd have given one.
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That said, I'm sure the death count numbers from the Rasht Massacre are staggeringly higher than the initial tallies of 2-5k.
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Leftists, with Western pro-Khomeini protests, not just in Iran, with the usual involvement from the KGB, and the CIA opposing, brought Khomeini to power with claims that he would bring a communist revolution. As per tradition in a communist revolution, first thing he did once in power is execute communist allies. Of course, Iran is still allied with the KGB (now FSB) and Moscow, currently delivering weapons and weapon designs for use in the war against Ukraine.You could also point out that Iran is kind-of socialist, in the sense that the state controls, at minimum, 70% of the economy, and all those "companies" are directly controlled by the government.So socialists are still at it, supporting the ayatollah, for example:https://marxist.com/iran-for-a-nationwide-uprising-down-with...Note: yes, I get what the title says, but read. IN the article you'll find an insane rant about how Israel and the US are really behind the revolution and how despite that the regime really held back, and this popular revolution, if it fails will bring back national Iranian pride, and the revolution failing will be the final push that ayatollah's need to actually bring the communist revolution to Iran
You could also point out that Iran is kind-of socialist, in the sense that the state controls, at minimum, 70% of the economy, and all those "companies" are directly controlled by the government.So socialists are still at it, supporting the ayatollah, for example:https://marxist.com/iran-for-a-nationwide-uprising-down-with...Note: yes, I get what the title says, but read. IN the article you'll find an insane rant about how Israel and the US are really behind the revolution and how despite that the regime really held back, and this popular revolution, if it fails will bring back national Iranian pride, and the revolution failing will be the final push that ayatollah's need to actually bring the communist revolution to Iran
So socialists are still at it, supporting the ayatollah, for example:https://marxist.com/iran-for-a-nationwide-uprising-down-with...Note: yes, I get what the title says, but read. IN the article you'll find an insane rant about how Israel and the US are really behind the revolution and how despite that the regime really held back, and this popular revolution, if it fails will bring back national Iranian pride, and the revolution failing will be the final push that ayatollah's need to actually bring the communist revolution to Iran
https://marxist.com/iran-for-a-nationwide-uprising-down-with...Note: yes, I get what the title says, but read. IN the article you'll find an insane rant about how Israel and the US are really behind the revolution and how despite that the regime really held back, and this popular revolution, if it fails will bring back national Iranian pride, and the revolution failing will be the final push that ayatollah's need to actually bring the communist revolution to Iran
Note: yes, I get what the title says, but read. IN the article you'll find an insane rant about how Israel and the US are really behind the revolution and how despite that the regime really held back, and this popular revolution, if it fails will bring back national Iranian pride, and the revolution failing will be the final push that ayatollah's need to actually bring the communist revolution to Iran
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Including the Mossad, which is kinda an important footnote you might not want to omit: https://xcancel.com/BarakRavid/status/1560685368780939265/
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https://youtu.be/K1VTt_THL4A?si=BRgS6kbEMvLvrjyW
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There is zero journalistic integrity to be found in his post.
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This is such a dangerous manipulation technique that uses the output of one media source like Fox News as an attack on the reputation of all. CNN and the BBC have reported on Israel's offensive and the massive suffering and death multiple times."Study disputes Gaza genocide charges, finds flawed data amid Hamas-driven narrative"https://www.foxnews.com/world/study-disputes-gaza-genocide-c...#--------------"Gaza death toll has been significantly underreported, study finds"https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/09/middleeast/gaza-death-toll-un..."More than 70,000 killed in Gaza since Israel offensive began, Hamas-run health ministry says"https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8e97kl240lo
"Study disputes Gaza genocide charges, finds flawed data amid Hamas-driven narrative"https://www.foxnews.com/world/study-disputes-gaza-genocide-c...#--------------"Gaza death toll has been significantly underreported, study finds"https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/09/middleeast/gaza-death-toll-un..."More than 70,000 killed in Gaza since Israel offensive began, Hamas-run health ministry says"https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8e97kl240lo
https://www.foxnews.com/world/study-disputes-gaza-genocide-c...#--------------"Gaza death toll has been significantly underreported, study finds"https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/09/middleeast/gaza-death-toll-un..."More than 70,000 killed in Gaza since Israel offensive began, Hamas-run health ministry says"https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8e97kl240lo
#--------------"Gaza death toll has been significantly underreported, study finds"https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/09/middleeast/gaza-death-toll-un..."More than 70,000 killed in Gaza since Israel offensive began, Hamas-run health ministry says"https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8e97kl240lo
"Gaza death toll has been significantly underreported, study finds"https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/09/middleeast/gaza-death-toll-un..."More than 70,000 killed in Gaza since Israel offensive began, Hamas-run health ministry says"https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8e97kl240lo
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/09/middleeast/gaza-death-toll-un..."More than 70,000 killed in Gaza since Israel offensive began, Hamas-run health ministry says"https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8e97kl240lo
"More than 70,000 killed in Gaza since Israel offensive began, Hamas-run health ministry says"https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8e97kl240lo
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8e97kl240lo
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Note that this works both ways: "Interesting that the same western media outlets which spent two years nonstop covering Gaza are totally fine not even having a single article about the massacre committed by the islamist iranian regime. And, no, before the trolls descend, of course I'm not questioning that lots of innocent people have been killed in Gaza.".And "Interesting that the same protesters who spent months protesting on US and EU campuses for Gaza are not protesting to defend the protesters massacred en masse by the iranian regime. And, no, before the trolls descend, of course I'm not questioning that lots of innocent people have been killed in Gaza".We don't know if the numbers are true but we're literally talking about half the death in two years in Gaza in a few days in Iran. I don't know if people realize the level of horrors we're talking about here.
And "Interesting that the same protesters who spent months protesting on US and EU campuses for Gaza are not protesting to defend the protesters massacred en masse by the iranian regime. And, no, before the trolls descend, of course I'm not questioning that lots of innocent people have been killed in Gaza".We don't know if the numbers are true but we're literally talking about half the death in two years in Gaza in a few days in Iran. I don't know if people realize the level of horrors we're talking about here.
We don't know if the numbers are true but we're literally talking about half the death in two years in Gaza in a few days in Iran. I don't know if people realize the level of horrors we're talking about here.
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You can also protest to make sure the horrors aren't forgotten and to signal to those suffering in Iran that they aren't alone.
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> You can still protest to signal support for usa to keep its hardline stance on Iran or to increase measures.If you care about the wellbeing of Iranian people, you have to acknowledge that a "hardline stance" of sanctions also contributes to their suffering. I'm not sure why you'd expect to see people out on the streets asking for more of that.https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-1...> You can also protest to make sure the horrors aren't forgotten and to signal to those suffering in Iran that they aren't alone.True, but as a citizen you have much less moral responsibility to protest that than a situation your government and taxes are supporting. Which probably explains why you don't see as many people out on the streets about that.I'd say it's also tricky in such situations to protest and not have your protest co-opted to justify aggression. Chomsky made this point on Iran: "Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don't agree with, like bombing."https://www.ft.com/content/afc74988-8c96-11e2-aed2-00144feab...
If you care about the wellbeing of Iranian people, you have to acknowledge that a "hardline stance" of sanctions also contributes to their suffering. I'm not sure why you'd expect to see people out on the streets asking for more of that.https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-1...> You can also protest to make sure the horrors aren't forgotten and to signal to those suffering in Iran that they aren't alone.True, but as a citizen you have much less moral responsibility to protest that than a situation your government and taxes are supporting. Which probably explains why you don't see as many people out on the streets about that.I'd say it's also tricky in such situations to protest and not have your protest co-opted to justify aggression. Chomsky made this point on Iran: "Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don't agree with, like bombing."https://www.ft.com/content/afc74988-8c96-11e2-aed2-00144feab...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-1...> You can also protest to make sure the horrors aren't forgotten and to signal to those suffering in Iran that they aren't alone.True, but as a citizen you have much less moral responsibility to protest that than a situation your government and taxes are supporting. Which probably explains why you don't see as many people out on the streets about that.I'd say it's also tricky in such situations to protest and not have your protest co-opted to justify aggression. Chomsky made this point on Iran: "Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don't agree with, like bombing."https://www.ft.com/content/afc74988-8c96-11e2-aed2-00144feab...
> You can also protest to make sure the horrors aren't forgotten and to signal to those suffering in Iran that they aren't alone.True, but as a citizen you have much less moral responsibility to protest that than a situation your government and taxes are supporting. Which probably explains why you don't see as many people out on the streets about that.I'd say it's also tricky in such situations to protest and not have your protest co-opted to justify aggression. Chomsky made this point on Iran: "Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don't agree with, like bombing."https://www.ft.com/content/afc74988-8c96-11e2-aed2-00144feab...
True, but as a citizen you have much less moral responsibility to protest that than a situation your government and taxes are supporting. Which probably explains why you don't see as many people out on the streets about that.I'd say it's also tricky in such situations to protest and not have your protest co-opted to justify aggression. Chomsky made this point on Iran: "Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don't agree with, like bombing."https://www.ft.com/content/afc74988-8c96-11e2-aed2-00144feab...
I'd say it's also tricky in such situations to protest and not have your protest co-opted to justify aggression. Chomsky made this point on Iran: "Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don't agree with, like bombing."https://www.ft.com/content/afc74988-8c96-11e2-aed2-00144feab...
https://www.ft.com/content/afc74988-8c96-11e2-aed2-00144feab...
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The point i was responding to was whether such protests [for Iranians] are pointless, and i asserted there can certainly be a point to them.Different people care about different things. I doubt the "tax dollar" explanation for Gaza protests because they seem just as popular in countries that dont provide aid to Israel, and people seemed to care a lot more about Gaza than say Iraq, despite much much more tax dollars going there and much more people dead. Nonetheless people are going to care about different issues to different extents for whatever reason and I'm not objecting to that.> If you care about the wellbeing of Iranian people, you have to acknowledge that a "hardline stance" of sanctions also contributes to their suffering.I do not have to. Or more specificly such sanctions have complex impacts and it can be unclear what the overall net result is, especially over the long run.Sanctions against Iran of course do not solely have to do with the human rights situation and are also being applied for various geopolitical reasons.> I'd say it's also tricky in such situations to protest and not have your protest co-opted to justify aggression. Chomsky made this point on Iran: "Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don't agree with, like bombing."That sounds like a long winded way to justify not caring about atrocities when doing so would be inconvinent. Quite frankly i find that morally rephresible.If you only care about human rights when its politically expedient to do so, do you really care about human rights?
Different people care about different things. I doubt the "tax dollar" explanation for Gaza protests because they seem just as popular in countries that dont provide aid to Israel, and people seemed to care a lot more about Gaza than say Iraq, despite much much more tax dollars going there and much more people dead. Nonetheless people are going to care about different issues to different extents for whatever reason and I'm not objecting to that.> If you care about the wellbeing of Iranian people, you have to acknowledge that a "hardline stance" of sanctions also contributes to their suffering.I do not have to. Or more specificly such sanctions have complex impacts and it can be unclear what the overall net result is, especially over the long run.Sanctions against Iran of course do not solely have to do with the human rights situation and are also being applied for various geopolitical reasons.> I'd say it's also tricky in such situations to protest and not have your protest co-opted to justify aggression. Chomsky made this point on Iran: "Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don't agree with, like bombing."That sounds like a long winded way to justify not caring about atrocities when doing so would be inconvinent. Quite frankly i find that morally rephresible.If you only care about human rights when its politically expedient to do so, do you really care about human rights?
> If you care about the wellbeing of Iranian people, you have to acknowledge that a "hardline stance" of sanctions also contributes to their suffering.I do not have to. Or more specificly such sanctions have complex impacts and it can be unclear what the overall net result is, especially over the long run.Sanctions against Iran of course do not solely have to do with the human rights situation and are also being applied for various geopolitical reasons.> I'd say it's also tricky in such situations to protest and not have your protest co-opted to justify aggression. Chomsky made this point on Iran: "Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don't agree with, like bombing."That sounds like a long winded way to justify not caring about atrocities when doing so would be inconvinent. Quite frankly i find that morally rephresible.If you only care about human rights when its politically expedient to do so, do you really care about human rights?
I do not have to. Or more specificly such sanctions have complex impacts and it can be unclear what the overall net result is, especially over the long run.Sanctions against Iran of course do not solely have to do with the human rights situation and are also being applied for various geopolitical reasons.> I'd say it's also tricky in such situations to protest and not have your protest co-opted to justify aggression. Chomsky made this point on Iran: "Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don't agree with, like bombing."That sounds like a long winded way to justify not caring about atrocities when doing so would be inconvinent. Quite frankly i find that morally rephresible.If you only care about human rights when its politically expedient to do so, do you really care about human rights?
Sanctions against Iran of course do not solely have to do with the human rights situation and are also being applied for various geopolitical reasons.> I'd say it's also tricky in such situations to protest and not have your protest co-opted to justify aggression. Chomsky made this point on Iran: "Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don't agree with, like bombing."That sounds like a long winded way to justify not caring about atrocities when doing so would be inconvinent. Quite frankly i find that morally rephresible.If you only care about human rights when its politically expedient to do so, do you really care about human rights?
> I'd say it's also tricky in such situations to protest and not have your protest co-opted to justify aggression. Chomsky made this point on Iran: "Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don't agree with, like bombing."That sounds like a long winded way to justify not caring about atrocities when doing so would be inconvinent. Quite frankly i find that morally rephresible.If you only care about human rights when its politically expedient to do so, do you really care about human rights?
That sounds like a long winded way to justify not caring about atrocities when doing so would be inconvinent. Quite frankly i find that morally rephresible.If you only care about human rights when its politically expedient to do so, do you really care about human rights?
If you only care about human rights when its politically expedient to do so, do you really care about human rights?
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EDIT: Sorry... that is too strong... "state aligned influence media". Note that the headline might be true, or it might not, but that source is quite glowy.
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That's like ~40% of the deaths in the current gaza war, except over just 2 days instead of 2 years.
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Sure you will get some nay-sayers who say 'a life is a life', if moral particles existed, they might be correct.But for some reason, humanity doesn't seem to care as much.What makes intra-state politics more acceptable to use violence?
But for some reason, humanity doesn't seem to care as much.What makes intra-state politics more acceptable to use violence?
What makes intra-state politics more acceptable to use violence?
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I don't know that anyone thinks a state's violence against its citizens is less immoral. It's more that countries are more hesitant to get militarily involved in the domestic affairs of another country because it would mean essentially declaring war against that state. But in a conflict between states, an outsider can more easily support one side militarily without declaring war against the other side.
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Luckily we have largely moved past that view.I think as a purely practical matter, moral outrage is shaped by who controls the information space. If you are a country being invaded, you probably have an organized, well funded communication department to tell your side. If you are an Iranian protestor, not only do you not have that, you don't even have internet at all because the state cut off all means of communication.
I think as a purely practical matter, moral outrage is shaped by who controls the information space. If you are a country being invaded, you probably have an organized, well funded communication department to tell your side. If you are an Iranian protestor, not only do you not have that, you don't even have internet at all because the state cut off all means of communication.
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That's from my readings of philosophy.But yeah, I do recognize the same sentiment as you found. I think philosophy itself is an answer: most philosophies explicitly champion dictatorships, under whitewashed terms. Ever heard something like “society is a big organ transcending individual needs”? We got it from Hegel.
But yeah, I do recognize the same sentiment as you found. I think philosophy itself is an answer: most philosophies explicitly champion dictatorships, under whitewashed terms. Ever heard something like “society is a big organ transcending individual needs”? We got it from Hegel.
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I don't understand how you could make this claim."society is a big organ transcending individual needs”?"How does this statement by Hegel champion dictatorships?
"society is a big organ transcending individual needs”?"How does this statement by Hegel champion dictatorships?
How does this statement by Hegel champion dictatorships?
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After studying Plato, Hegel, Marx, Rousseau, fascist ideologies, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. This list is by no means exhaustive, just a few majors from the top of my head.Sure, they didn't just say “shoot people for power.” That's a very shallow modern view. Instead, they champion extreme forms of altruism and its only logical expression: statism, which holds that man's life and work belong to the state, to society, to the group, the race, the nation, the economic class.> How does this statement by Hegel champion dictatorships?The statement alone surely doesn't. His philosophy does. For him, state is a sacred authority that transcends individual will.
Sure, they didn't just say “shoot people for power.” That's a very shallow modern view. Instead, they champion extreme forms of altruism and its only logical expression: statism, which holds that man's life and work belong to the state, to society, to the group, the race, the nation, the economic class.> How does this statement by Hegel champion dictatorships?The statement alone surely doesn't. His philosophy does. For him, state is a sacred authority that transcends individual will.
> How does this statement by Hegel champion dictatorships?The statement alone surely doesn't. His philosophy does. For him, state is a sacred authority that transcends individual will.
The statement alone surely doesn't. His philosophy does. For him, state is a sacred authority that transcends individual will.
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State authority exists in democracys therefore that's not an argument for dictatorships>they champion extreme forms of altruism and its only logical expression: statismWhy is statism the only logical expression of extreme altruism? Jesus Christ was the ultimate altruist and is not a state. I can dedicate my life to only helping others over myself as an individual .You're arguments and example are extremely poor because you showing evidence related to governments and states but your original claim was to one specific type of government, a dictatorship.
>they champion extreme forms of altruism and its only logical expression: statismWhy is statism the only logical expression of extreme altruism? Jesus Christ was the ultimate altruist and is not a state. I can dedicate my life to only helping others over myself as an individual .You're arguments and example are extremely poor because you showing evidence related to governments and states but your original claim was to one specific type of government, a dictatorship.
Why is statism the only logical expression of extreme altruism? Jesus Christ was the ultimate altruist and is not a state. I can dedicate my life to only helping others over myself as an individual .You're arguments and example are extremely poor because you showing evidence related to governments and states but your original claim was to one specific type of government, a dictatorship.
You're arguments and example are extremely poor because you showing evidence related to governments and states but your original claim was to one specific type of government, a dictatorship.
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Jesus Christ wasn't a politician so we don't know. But we do know that religious politicians, past and modern, rarely respect freedom.> you showing evidence related to governments and statesNot just states but statism, a system in which man's life and work belong to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it. This provides the theoretical hardware for dictatorial control.
> you showing evidence related to governments and statesNot just states but statism, a system in which man's life and work belong to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it. This provides the theoretical hardware for dictatorial control.
Not just states but statism, a system in which man's life and work belong to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it. This provides the theoretical hardware for dictatorial control.
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I don't think that's a particularly established moral position.
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Acceptable? It's more about the consequences or lack thereof, the incentivesHistory has shown that pretty much nothing happens to the regime unless two coalitions of countries invade from both sides simultaneously, and that's like, not going to happen
History has shown that pretty much nothing happens to the regime unless two coalitions of countries invade from both sides simultaneously, and that's like, not going to happen
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Who holds this opinion?>But for some reason, humanity doesn't seem to care as much.All of humanity cares less about when a government uses violence against its citizens than wars?How can you possibly make this generalization when each internal conflict is different just like every war and how difficult it is to measure sympathy
>But for some reason, humanity doesn't seem to care as much.All of humanity cares less about when a government uses violence against its citizens than wars?How can you possibly make this generalization when each internal conflict is different just like every war and how difficult it is to measure sympathy
All of humanity cares less about when a government uses violence against its citizens than wars?How can you possibly make this generalization when each internal conflict is different just like every war and how difficult it is to measure sympathy
How can you possibly make this generalization when each internal conflict is different just like every war and how difficult it is to measure sympathy
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Which books say that?
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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/research-news/2846/
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"No matter what your beliefs are"? Some people believe that Israel is trying to make the people in Gaza starve. If that was true, how would they not be a target?
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests...
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but yeah, compared to what Israelis do in Gaza or Iran, even whole Beijing numbers are negligible considering China population
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As for the numbers: Interior Ministry reports say security forces confronted demonstrators in more than 400 cities and towns, with more than 4,000 clash locations reported nationwide
it's on the order of 100 deaths at each of 400 locations (clearly not uniformly distributed, some locations would have had many more deaths).As to the how, the article suggests some deaths immediately occurred in crowds - firing, dispersing, funneling, crush injuries, etc. leading to many intakes to hospitals and treatment tents etc ... followed by execution of the injured.It's grim stuff.Some years past the waves of the Rwanda massacres saw almost a million people killed in bursts across 100 days, mostly with machetes and hand guns.The numbers reported here are absolutely feasible, the reporting is certainly questionable; bad things happened, but was it at the claimed scale?
Interior Ministry reports say security forces confronted demonstrators in more than 400 cities and towns, with more than 4,000 clash locations reported nationwide
it's on the order of 100 deaths at each of 400 locations (clearly not uniformly distributed, some locations would have had many more deaths).As to the how, the article suggests some deaths immediately occurred in crowds - firing, dispersing, funneling, crush injuries, etc. leading to many intakes to hospitals and treatment tents etc ... followed by execution of the injured.It's grim stuff.Some years past the waves of the Rwanda massacres saw almost a million people killed in bursts across 100 days, mostly with machetes and hand guns.The numbers reported here are absolutely feasible, the reporting is certainly questionable; bad things happened, but was it at the claimed scale?
As to the how, the article suggests some deaths immediately occurred in crowds - firing, dispersing, funneling, crush injuries, etc. leading to many intakes to hospitals and treatment tents etc ... followed by execution of the injured.It's grim stuff.Some years past the waves of the Rwanda massacres saw almost a million people killed in bursts across 100 days, mostly with machetes and hand guns.The numbers reported here are absolutely feasible, the reporting is certainly questionable; bad things happened, but was it at the claimed scale?
It's grim stuff.Some years past the waves of the Rwanda massacres saw almost a million people killed in bursts across 100 days, mostly with machetes and hand guns.The numbers reported here are absolutely feasible, the reporting is certainly questionable; bad things happened, but was it at the claimed scale?
Some years past the waves of the Rwanda massacres saw almost a million people killed in bursts across 100 days, mostly with machetes and hand guns.The numbers reported here are absolutely feasible, the reporting is certainly questionable; bad things happened, but was it at the claimed scale?
The numbers reported here are absolutely feasible, the reporting is certainly questionable; bad things happened, but was it at the claimed scale?
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Quite a lot of detail in the nyt article https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/25/world/middleeast/iran-how...
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The article says "36,500 killed in 400 cities". That's 91 people per city.
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"Iranian security forces deployed unknown chemical substances amid deadly crackdowns on protestors in several cities earlier this month, eyewitnesses told Iran International, causing severe breathing problems and burning pain.They described symptoms that they said went beyond those caused by conventional tear gas, including severe breathing difficulties, sudden weakness and loss of movement......According to the accounts, in some cases gunfire began at the same time, or immediately after, protesters lost the ability to walk or run and fell to the ground.Several witnesses said that moments of immobilization became points at which shooting intensified, particularly when protesters collapsed in alleys or while trying to flee.Reports came from multiple cities, including Tehran, Isfahan and Sabzevar."https://www.iranintl.com/en/202601235991
They described symptoms that they said went beyond those caused by conventional tear gas, including severe breathing difficulties, sudden weakness and loss of movement......According to the accounts, in some cases gunfire began at the same time, or immediately after, protesters lost the ability to walk or run and fell to the ground.Several witnesses said that moments of immobilization became points at which shooting intensified, particularly when protesters collapsed in alleys or while trying to flee.Reports came from multiple cities, including Tehran, Isfahan and Sabzevar."https://www.iranintl.com/en/202601235991
...According to the accounts, in some cases gunfire began at the same time, or immediately after, protesters lost the ability to walk or run and fell to the ground.Several witnesses said that moments of immobilization became points at which shooting intensified, particularly when protesters collapsed in alleys or while trying to flee.Reports came from multiple cities, including Tehran, Isfahan and Sabzevar."https://www.iranintl.com/en/202601235991
Several witnesses said that moments of immobilization became points at which shooting intensified, particularly when protesters collapsed in alleys or while trying to flee.Reports came from multiple cities, including Tehran, Isfahan and Sabzevar."https://www.iranintl.com/en/202601235991
Reports came from multiple cities, including Tehran, Isfahan and Sabzevar."https://www.iranintl.com/en/202601235991
https://www.iranintl.com/en/202601235991
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The official name of Iran is "The Islamic Republic of Iran" and it is a country ruled by sharia law. Countries ruled by Sharia are already totalitarian states.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_InternationalBut does the number even matter? Whether its 4000 or 35000 the conduct has been unacceptable.The real question is the solution, is reporting like this designed to be used as the backdrop to foreign intervention? How many people will be killed then?"one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic" - Not Stalin
But does the number even matter? Whether its 4000 or 35000 the conduct has been unacceptable.The real question is the solution, is reporting like this designed to be used as the backdrop to foreign intervention? How many people will be killed then?"one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic" - Not Stalin
The real question is the solution, is reporting like this designed to be used as the backdrop to foreign intervention? How many people will be killed then?"one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic" - Not Stalin
"one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic" - Not Stalin
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Or does that logic only apply to US-based developments?
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However, it also says:> "Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it." [0][0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> "Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it." [0][0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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what's wrong with it?
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IE as the right is becoming more anti-Israel, you find a lot more pro Islamic Republic stuff there these days. The boomer and zoomer right are very different beasts.I don't follow the left as closely these days, but imagine there are a myriad of opinions on the matter.
I don't follow the left as closely these days, but imagine there are a myriad of opinions on the matter.
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I used to read the English version of Russia today, and it was almost comical to seem them oscillate articles that fit the "Based Mother Russia of Traditional Values" trope, then right next to it nostalgic Tankie stuff or the anti "Western Imperialist" think pieces. It's like they didn't even know who their useful idiots were anymore.
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don't know a solution but this one isn't it
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Machiavelli in Discourses on Livy says you are inviting an overthrow of your government by doing this.The mercenaries can flip sides if the opposite faction pays them and offers them better terms... or maybe the mercs just flip.Hard to say how true this is.
The mercenaries can flip sides if the opposite faction pays them and offers them better terms... or maybe the mercs just flip.Hard to say how true this is.
Hard to say how true this is.
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I hate how irrational our species is and how unempathetic we are to situations not immediately in front of us.And Trump should not have promised assistance. How many more people are dead because they were encouraged by said promise? Some of these deaths can surely be attributed to him.
And Trump should not have promised assistance. How many more people are dead because they were encouraged by said promise? Some of these deaths can surely be attributed to him.
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We make decisions all the time that result in immense amount of unnecessary suffering because of a total lack of rationality.Our food consumption choices alone have created the objectively largest and most horrific engine of suffering in the history of this planet, all for the pleasure of our taste buds. The average person is directly responsible for this.It is the irrationality and lack of empathy of the average person that bothers me. Unless you show them a video of protestors being massacred in Iran, or take them to a factory farm, they don't care. And even then, they often don't care. Why?Suffering is roughly sortable and it is certainly within the power of most people to drive down the greatest sources of suffering, and pressure their government to do so when it is not directly within their power.But people are irrational.
Our food consumption choices alone have created the objectively largest and most horrific engine of suffering in the history of this planet, all for the pleasure of our taste buds. The average person is directly responsible for this.It is the irrationality and lack of empathy of the average person that bothers me. Unless you show them a video of protestors being massacred in Iran, or take them to a factory farm, they don't care. And even then, they often don't care. Why?Suffering is roughly sortable and it is certainly within the power of most people to drive down the greatest sources of suffering, and pressure their government to do so when it is not directly within their power.But people are irrational.
It is the irrationality and lack of empathy of the average person that bothers me. Unless you show them a video of protestors being massacred in Iran, or take them to a factory farm, they don't care. And even then, they often don't care. Why?Suffering is roughly sortable and it is certainly within the power of most people to drive down the greatest sources of suffering, and pressure their government to do so when it is not directly within their power.But people are irrational.
Suffering is roughly sortable and it is certainly within the power of most people to drive down the greatest sources of suffering, and pressure their government to do so when it is not directly within their power.But people are irrational.
But people are irrational.
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https://reason.com/2026/01/23/the-trump-administration-plans...The US shipped the carrier battle group in the region out to support the Venezuela operations, and is deporting asylum seekers back to their deaths this week.Nobody in the US has any idea what is happening in Iran. Judging by the weird, not very HN like threads on this post, sounds like we are going to.
The US shipped the carrier battle group in the region out to support the Venezuela operations, and is deporting asylum seekers back to their deaths this week.Nobody in the US has any idea what is happening in Iran. Judging by the weird, not very HN like threads on this post, sounds like we are going to.
Nobody in the US has any idea what is happening in Iran. Judging by the weird, not very HN like threads on this post, sounds like we are going to.
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The irony is that now those who are still alive in Iran might remember this and update their notion of US trustworthiness accordingly.
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They're not going to be outraged over the people they support killing protestors who want to topple the thing they support.Also, just to be fair, there's also some right-wing obvious Russian agents weirdly not condemning the Islamic Republic...
Also, just to be fair, there's also some right-wing obvious Russian agents weirdly not condemning the Islamic Republic...
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I'm on the side of the Iranian protestors, not the murderous Islamic regime and terrorists, nor their murderous Russian allies.What's vile is not being opposed to the murder of 36000 people.
What's vile is not being opposed to the murder of 36000 people.
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But you keep bringing up Zionists which gives a clue as to your persuasions, especially since they have no role in any of the events discussed here unless you believe the "Jews run the world" conspiracy theories.Anyhow, the horseshoe is real and the Russian/Iranian money trail is real...Here's some examples: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/24/uk-protest-gro...https://time.com/7005190/iran-gaza-protests-nuanced-reality/https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/iranian-government-actors-se...https://www.timesofisrael.com/nancy-pelosi-calls-for-fbi-pro...
Anyhow, the horseshoe is real and the Russian/Iranian money trail is real...Here's some examples: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/24/uk-protest-gro...https://time.com/7005190/iran-gaza-protests-nuanced-reality/https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/iranian-government-actors-se...https://www.timesofisrael.com/nancy-pelosi-calls-for-fbi-pro...
Here's some examples: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/24/uk-protest-gro...https://time.com/7005190/iran-gaza-protests-nuanced-reality/https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/iranian-government-actors-se...https://www.timesofisrael.com/nancy-pelosi-calls-for-fbi-pro...
https://time.com/7005190/iran-gaza-protests-nuanced-reality/https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/iranian-government-actors-se...https://www.timesofisrael.com/nancy-pelosi-calls-for-fbi-pro...
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/iranian-government-actors-se...https://www.timesofisrael.com/nancy-pelosi-calls-for-fbi-pro...
https://www.timesofisrael.com/nancy-pelosi-calls-for-fbi-pro...
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If Palestine had full US backing they would push Israelis in to the ocean and claiming otherwise is dishonest.
UAE is the largest backer of Palestine, they have no qualms backing genocide in Sudan. So it's just as reasonable to claim jihadism has no respect for property or for life.This isn't whataboutism, if this money wasn't flowing you wouldn't hear about it.
This isn't whataboutism, if this money wasn't flowing you wouldn't hear about it.
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The notion of some well-defined "people" is a fiction that ruling powers use to keep humanity's innate tribalistic tendencies pointed outward at their adversaries.The truth is that the powers-that-be consider themselves to be above "the people", and will dispose of you as soon as you become inconvenient.
The truth is that the powers-that-be consider themselves to be above "the people", and will dispose of you as soon as you become inconvenient.
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Renee Good. Alex Pretti.It's not just that they were killed but so much of the country including, most relevantly, the administration, believe they should have been killed.It's not hard to other any set of people.
It's not just that they were killed but so much of the country including, most relevantly, the administration, believe they should have been killed.It's not hard to other any set of people.
It's not hard to other any set of people.
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The end of the regime was brought about by an incursion into the Vietnamese border town of Ba Chúc, resulting in the massacre of more than 3000 civilians. Vietnam invaded, toppled the Khmer Rouge and brought an end to the executions although civil war would continue for much of the next decade.For these actions Vietnam was extensively sanctioned[1]. The parallels with ongoing conflicts today are hard to ignore.[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge#Crimes_against_hum...[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian%E2%80%93Vietnamese_W...
For these actions Vietnam was extensively sanctioned[1]. The parallels with ongoing conflicts today are hard to ignore.[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge#Crimes_against_hum...[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian%E2%80%93Vietnamese_W...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge#Crimes_against_hum...[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian%E2%80%93Vietnamese_W...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian%E2%80%93Vietnamese_W...
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“ While most of the killings were carried out by IRGC and Basij forces, reports received by Iran International indicate that proxy forces from Iraq and Syria were also used in the crackdown. The deployment of non-local forces suggests a decision to expand repression capacity as quickly as possible.”
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Also, read the article. :)
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Usually mercenaries mean people doing it for money not ideology who get paid significantly more than your average soldier.
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It's generally not very hard to incite violence across groups in the Middle East, especially when you consider how bad the outcome might be for the losing side. Case in point, the Alawites who lost control of Syria and are now persecuted by the new government.
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There's maybe some disquiet in realizing that they're not someone you can side with, too.And for sure some of the outlets followed by the protesters have ties to Iran, sadly.
And for sure some of the outlets followed by the protesters have ties to Iran, sadly.
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This is not a comment of support of the Iranian regime, or against the people of Iran to have which ever government they see fit.But these numbers are simply not credible. It's 40 beheaded babies all over again.Remember the governing ideology of the US and Israel sees the continued existence of Iran as an existential threat. Their aims may align with the protestors temporarily but I think a permanently fractured, Syria type situation is much more palatable to them than a rapid transition to a more democratic system that leaves the country intact. There is no guarantee a post-islamic Iran would step into line, and it would remain a regional power that would be much harder to justify continued sanctions against.A part of me suspects the incredibly conspicuous endorsement of the protestors by the US/Israel regime is an attempt to discredit them. A zombie regime under the Mullahs will likely to continue to implode economically, which means they are less able to defend themselves from US/Israeli attacks in the future. A clean change of government with domestic US pressure to lift sanctions would be their nightmare scenario.
But these numbers are simply not credible. It's 40 beheaded babies all over again.Remember the governing ideology of the US and Israel sees the continued existence of Iran as an existential threat. Their aims may align with the protestors temporarily but I think a permanently fractured, Syria type situation is much more palatable to them than a rapid transition to a more democratic system that leaves the country intact. There is no guarantee a post-islamic Iran would step into line, and it would remain a regional power that would be much harder to justify continued sanctions against.A part of me suspects the incredibly conspicuous endorsement of the protestors by the US/Israel regime is an attempt to discredit them. A zombie regime under the Mullahs will likely to continue to implode economically, which means they are less able to defend themselves from US/Israeli attacks in the future. A clean change of government with domestic US pressure to lift sanctions would be their nightmare scenario.
Remember the governing ideology of the US and Israel sees the continued existence of Iran as an existential threat. Their aims may align with the protestors temporarily but I think a permanently fractured, Syria type situation is much more palatable to them than a rapid transition to a more democratic system that leaves the country intact. There is no guarantee a post-islamic Iran would step into line, and it would remain a regional power that would be much harder to justify continued sanctions against.A part of me suspects the incredibly conspicuous endorsement of the protestors by the US/Israel regime is an attempt to discredit them. A zombie regime under the Mullahs will likely to continue to implode economically, which means they are less able to defend themselves from US/Israeli attacks in the future. A clean change of government with domestic US pressure to lift sanctions would be their nightmare scenario.
A part of me suspects the incredibly conspicuous endorsement of the protestors by the US/Israel regime is an attempt to discredit them. A zombie regime under the Mullahs will likely to continue to implode economically, which means they are less able to defend themselves from US/Israeli attacks in the future. A clean change of government with domestic US pressure to lift sanctions would be their nightmare scenario.
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Note, I'm not saying that they have been confirmed, but I do not think that you have given sufficient cause for rejecting them out of hand.
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This is the organisation most commonly cited in news reports, they estimate ~5200 protestors confirmed killed (+ a few hundred more for security personnel killed)They are a group of anti-regime Iranian dissidents based in the US. I don't know why they would seek to provide a deliberately low estimate.
They are a group of anti-regime Iranian dissidents based in the US. I don't know why they would seek to provide a deliberately low estimate.
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As of writing this comment, the subtitle says "The number of deaths currently under investigation stands at 17,031." They do not claim that this is the total number of deaths either.30,000 is not confirmed but cannot be ruled out.
30,000 is not confirmed but cannot be ruled out.
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https://battlefield.fandom.com/wiki/Battle_for_Tehran
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IntroductionStructure and CompositionFormation and MaintenanceBiological FunctionsThe Endothelial GlycocalyxRole in Health and DiseaseMethods to Study the GlycocalyxFuture OutlookReferences
The glycocalyx emerges as an active endothelial system whose structure, metabolism, and shear-dependent regulation integrate mechanical forces with vascular signaling. Disruption of this system provides a unifying mechanism linking endothelial dysfunction to inflammation, barrier failure, and cardiometabolic disease.
Image credit: Shutterstock AI/Shutterstock.com
For decades, researchers conceptualized the vascular endothelium as a simple, non-thrombogenic layer lining the blood vessels, a passive barrier separating the circulating blood from the vessel wall. More recent research has debunked this reductionist view by elucidating the endothelial glycocalyx (eGCX), a complex, gel-like "glycoscape" that coats the luminal surface of endothelial cells. 1
It is important to clarify that the term “GlycoLax” is a common pharmaceutical trade name for polyethylene glycol–based laxatives and is unrelated to vascular biology; the correct biological term discussed here is the endothelial glycocalyx. 2
Studies have shown that the glycocalyx is a dynamically regulated organelle that alters vascular homeostasis. It is now known to serve as the primary mechanotransducer of hemodynamic shear stress, a gatekeeper of vascular permeability, and a crucial modulator of the immune response.
This article synthesizes recent research to present a comprehensive overview of the glycocalyx, detailing its molecular architecture and non-template-driven biosynthesis and highlighting how these processes connect vascular health to cellular metabolism.
Furthermore, it unravels how the pathological "shedding" of this layer drives sepsis, diabetes, and atherosclerosis, and evaluates emerging therapeutic strategies, from sulodexide to synthetic glycoscapes, that aim to restore this fragile yet vital barrier.
The endothelial glycocalyx is a multicomponent, carbohydrate-rich layer that coats the luminal surface of endothelial cells. Formerly considered an artifact of microscopy, it is now identified as a critical regulator of the cell's interaction with its environment.1
A growing body of literature suggests that the glycocalyx functions as a physical barrier and a transduction interface, mediating the exchange of information and force between circulating blood and the vessel wall. Its integrity is the defining feature of a healthy vascular interface. At the same time, its degradation is increasingly recognized as a trigger for diverse pathologies ranging from acute inflammation to chronic vascular disease.1
Physically, the glycocalyx resembles a "bush-like" meshwork composed of a proteoglycan backbone and a canopy of glycosaminoglycans (GAGs). The layer's structural foundation is provided by transmembrane proteoglycans, primarily syndecans (particularly Syndecan-1), which anchor the layer to the cytoskeleton, and GPI-anchored glypicans (e.g., Glypican-1), which localize to lipid rafts.1,2
Extending from these proteoglycan cores are long, negatively charged GAG chains, predominantly heparan sulfate (50–90 %) and chondroitin sulfate, which create a vast reservoir for binding plasma ligands.1
Interwoven within this mesh is hyaluronan (hyaluronic acid), an extremely long, non-sulfated polymer that does not bind covalently to core proteins but instead interacts with surface receptors (e.g., CD44) to provide hydration and structural volume.1,2
Recent research highlights that, unlike most structural proteins (which are encoded in the host's DNA), the glycocalyx is synthesized through a complex, non-template-driven metabolic process.3
The glycocalyx's proteoglycan cores are synthesized in the Endoplasmic Reticulum (ER), while the GAG chains are elongated and modified by specific enzymes (such as EXT1/2 and sulfotransferases) in the Golgi apparatus.3 Hyaluronan has recently been shown to demonstrate a notable exception to this synthesis pathway; it is synthesized directly at the plasma membrane by Hyaluronan Synthases (HAS), with HAS2 being the dominant endothelial isoform. 4
Studies have shown that hemodynamic forces dynamically regulate the biological maintenance of the glycocalyx. Specifically, laminar shear stress activates the transcription factor KLF2, which upregulates HAS2 expression and redistributes endothelial glucose flux from glycolysis toward UDP-sugar biosynthesis, thereby supplying substrates required for glycocalyx regeneration. 9
Mechanistic investigations have identified three main glycocalyx functions: 1. Protection, 2. Permeability modulation, and 3. Mechanotransduction (conversion of physical environmental cues into biochemical signals).1,3,5
In the vascular system, the endothelial glycocalyx (eGCX) is the primary determinant of vascular health. A growing body of evidence indicates that the eGCX is not uniform across the body, with significant thickness and compositional heterogeneity among organs.1,5
In the renal glomerulus, the highly anionic glycocalyx contributes substantially to charge-selective filtration, and its degradation has been directly linked to albuminuria in both experimental and clinical studies. 3
In contrast, in the blood-brain barrier (BBB), a dense glycocalyx has been observed to work in concert with tight junctions to strictly limit the entry of potentially neurotoxic elements. Epidemiological and experimental studies now link BBB-associated eGCX degradation to neuroinflammation and cerebral edema.1,6
The degradation or "shedding" of the glycocalyx is now established as a hallmark of systemic disease. In sepsis, inflammatory cytokines and oxidative stress activate enzymes such as heparanase and matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs), leading to the release of syndecan-1 and heparan sulfate fragments into the circulation.2,6
A 2025 meta-analysis confirmed that elevated plasma levels of Syndecan-1 are significantly associated with increased mortality in sepsis patients (Odds Ratio = 2.04), validating glycocalyx degradation as a prognostic indicator of endothelial injury.7
Furthermore, in diabetes and atherosclerosis, disturbed shear stress and chronic metabolic dysfunction impair glycocalyx biosynthesis, exposing the endothelium to lipoprotein infiltration and leukocyte adhesion, thereby accelerating plaque formation.6,9
Traditional electron microscopy (EM) often dehydrates samples, causing glycocalyx collapse and underestimation of thickness. To overcome this, cryo-electron microscopy and Sidestream Dark Field (SDF) imaging are now used to preserve the hydrated endothelial surface layer in vivo.8
Recently, super-resolution techniques such as Resolution Enhancement by Sequential Imaging (RESI) combined with metabolic labeling have achieved ångström-level resolution, enabling visualization of individual sugar residues within intact cell-surface glycans.2
While earlier work emphasized visualization, the field is now shifting toward intervention. Glycocalyx-targeted therapeutics such as sulodexide, a mixture of heparan and dermatan sulfates, have demonstrated efficacy in restoring glycocalyx integrity, reducing endothelial permeability, and improving outcomes in experimental and clinical sepsis.1
Bioengineers are also developing synthetic glycoscapes, engineered nanomaterials designed to reconstitute endothelial surface layers, representing a promising frontier for acute vascular protection and precision therapeutics.2
Last Updated: Jan 26, 2026
Written by
Hugo Francisco de Souza is a scientific writer based in Bangalore, Karnataka, India. His academic passions lie in biogeography, evolutionary biology, and herpetology. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. from the Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, where he studies the origins, dispersal, and speciation of wetland-associated snakes. Hugo has received, amongst others, the DST-INSPIRE fellowship for his doctoral research and the Gold Medal from Pondicherry University for academic excellence during his Masters. His research has been published in high-impact peer-reviewed journals, including PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases and Systematic Biology. When not working or writing, Hugo can be found consuming copious amounts of anime and manga, composing and making music with his bass guitar, shredding trails on his MTB, playing video games (he prefers the term ‘gaming'), or tinkering with all things tech.
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Francisco de Souza, Hugo. (2026, January 26). What Is The Endothelial Glycocalyx And Why It Matters For Vascular Health. News-Medical. Retrieved on January 26, 2026 from https://www.news-medical.net/life-sciences/What-Is-The-Endothelial-Glycocalyx-And-Why-It-Matters-For-Vascular-Health.aspx.
MLA
Francisco de Souza, Hugo. "What Is The Endothelial Glycocalyx And Why It Matters For Vascular Health". News-Medical. 26 January 2026.
An expert editorial suggests that widely used diabetes and obesity drugs may help close the long-standing mortality gap faced by people with serious mental illnesses by tackling cardiovascular risk and metabolic disease head-on.
Editorial: Glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1 RAs) have potential to transform health outcomes for persons with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, major depressive disorder and other serious mental illnesses by lengthening healthspan and reducing excess and premature mortality. Image Credit: AtlasStudio / Shutterstock
A recent editorial published in the journal Expert Opinion on Pharmacotherapy discussed that glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists (RAs) may potentially transform health outcomes for individuals with serious mental illnesses (SMIs). The authors emphasized that these agents are most likely to improve outcomes by addressing the cardiometabolic drivers of excess morbidity and mortality rather than replacing established psychiatric treatments.
In 2005, the United States (US) Food and Drug Administration approved the first GLP-1 receptor agonist, exenatide, for the treatment of type 2 diabetes (T2D). Since then, several GLP-1 mono-agonists have been approved, along with tirzepatide, the first dual GLP-1 and glucose insulinotropic polypeptide (GIP) receptor agonist. Additional dual and triple agonists targeting GIP, GLP-1, and glucagon receptors are in late-stage development.
Beyond T2D and weight management in individuals with overweight or obesity, GLP-1 receptor agonists are approved for metabolic dysfunction associated steatohepatitis in people with moderate or advanced fibrosis, obstructive sleep apnea in obese adults, reduction of major adverse cardiovascular events in adults with T2D and cardiovascular disease (CVD), and slowing progression of chronic kidney disease and cardiovascular mortality in adults with both chronic kidney disease and T2D.
Synthetic small-molecule oral GLP-1 receptor agonists are expected to be approved in 2026, while oral semaglutide is already available. These formulations may ease barriers related to manufacturing, supply chains, and access. There is a broad consensus that GLP-1 receptor agonists have transformed the management of T2D, obesity, and related morbidity and have been associated with reduced progression of renal disease, cardiovascular disease, and mortality in people with metabolic disorders.
Schizophrenia, major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder (BD), and other SMIs are severe, prevalent, and lifelong conditions that are major contributors to disability, reduced healthspan, and diminished social and economic participation, particularly in younger populations. Individuals with SMIs experience premature and excess mortality, with years of life lost often estimated between 5 and 25 years, largely due to earlier onset and substantially higher rates of CVD.
Affordable, scalable, and effective interventions are therefore essential to increase healthspan and reduce cardiovascular-related mortality among people with SMIs. Each condition for which GLP-1 receptor agonists are approved contributes differently to cardiometabolic risk and healthspan loss in this population. In addition, several agents are in mid- or late-stage development for chronic diseases such as peripheral artery disease and atherosclerotic heart disease, which disproportionately affect individuals with SMIs.
Despite the availability and clinical effectiveness of antipsychotics, lithium, antidepressants, and anticonvulsants, reductions in healthspan loss and cardiovascular mortality have been demonstrated only for selected classes and agents, including second-generation long-acting antipsychotics, lithium, and clozapine. Lithium, in particular, remains under-prescribed despite its strong efficacy in BD, limiting its overall public health impact.
GLP-1 receptor agonists are recommended for managing weight gain associated with psychotropic medications when discontinuation of psychiatric treatment is not feasible. Preliminary evidence also suggests a potential protective effect against lithium-induced nephrotoxicity, a condition for which no approved therapy currently exists. Additionally, several GLP-1 receptor agonists are being developed or repurposed for the treatment of alcohol, tobacco, and opioid use disorders.
Preclinical studies, small controlled trials, and observational research further suggest that GLP-1 receptor agonists may have beneficial effects in the prevention and treatment of mood disorders and in psychopathology domains that substantially impair quality of life, including cognitive dysfunction and anhedonia.
Several safety considerations are particularly relevant for individuals with SMIs. For example, the constipating effects of GLP-1 receptor agonists may interact with gastrointestinal motility disturbances caused by psychotropic medications.
Clinicians should also consider the increased risks of pancreatitis and sarcopenia, conditions that disproportionately affect people with SMIs. Furthermore, GLP-1 receptor agonists that are renally eliminated, such as lixisenatide and exenatide, are contraindicated in severe renal disease, which is more prevalent in this population. Although early pharmacovigilance reports suggested a possible association with suicidality, larger subsequent studies have not demonstrated a causal link, though ongoing monitoring remains advisable.
Overall, individuals with SMIs account for a disproportionate share of years of life lost and disability-adjusted life years. Despite decades of advances in psychopharmacology, the mortality gap between the general population and people with SMIs has not meaningfully narrowed. Therapeutic strategies that directly reduce mortality and extend healthspan are therefore urgently needed.
In this context, GLP-1 receptor agonists represent one of the most promising pharmacological classes, particularly if challenges related to cost, equitable access, reimbursement policy, and supply constraints are addressed. Prioritizing individuals with SMIs within fair allocation frameworks may help reduce excess and premature mortality in this vulnerable population in the near term.
Posted in: Medical Research News | Medical Condition News | Pharmaceutical News
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Tarun is a writer based in Hyderabad, India. He has a Master's degree in Biotechnology from the University of Hyderabad and is enthusiastic about scientific research. He enjoys reading research papers and literature reviews and is passionate about writing.
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Sai Lomte, Tarun. (2026, January 25). New role for GLP-1 drugs: Improving survival in people with severe psychiatric disorders. News-Medical. Retrieved on January 26, 2026 from https://www.news-medical.net/news/20260125/New-role-for-GLP-1-drugs-Improving-survival-in-people-with-severe-psychiatric-disorders.aspx.
MLA
Sai Lomte, Tarun. "New role for GLP-1 drugs: Improving survival in people with severe psychiatric disorders". News-Medical. 26 January 2026.
A massive nationwide study shows that lighting up before age 20 leaves a lasting cardiovascular imprint, intensifying the damage of smoking and raising the risk of heart attack, stroke, and early death well into adulthood.
Study: Early age at smoking initiation is associated with elevated cardiovascular disease and mortality risk in a nationwide population-based cohort. Image Credit: Gudman / Shutterstock
In a recent study published in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers investigated whether the age at which people begin smoking is independently associated with future risks of myocardial infarction (MI), combined cardiovascular events, all-cause mortality, and stroke.
Individuals who started smoking at younger ages, particularly before 20 years, had substantially higher risks of death, stroke, and MI compared with later starters, even at the same level of cumulative smoking exposure. This suggests an additional risk beyond total smoking dose as measured by pack-years, while acknowledging that initiation age and lifetime exposure remain closely related behaviors.
Smoking is one of the leading preventable causes of death worldwide and remains a major contributor to cardiovascular disease, including MI and stroke. Extensive evidence shows that greater cumulative smoking exposure, measured in pack-years, increases cardiovascular risk.
However, this dose-response relationship is not entirely linear, as even light smoking can substantially elevate risk, suggesting that using pack-years as an indicator may not fully capture smoking-related harm.
Age at smoking initiation has emerged as a potential additional determinant of long-term health outcomes. Early initiation is associated with higher adult mortality and morbidity, possibly due to heightened biological vulnerability during development and long-lasting behavioral effects such as stronger nicotine dependence.
Despite this, prior studies on the effects of age at initiation on cardiovascular outcomes have yielded inconsistent findings, often limited by small sample sizes or inadequate adjustment for confounding factors.
Researchers investigated whether early smoking initiation independently increases mortality and cardiovascular risks and whether it modifies the effects of cumulative smoking exposure. They used a retrospective cohort study from a national health database in Korea, which covers more than 95% of the population through a mandatory health insurance system.
The study included 9,295,979 adults above the age of 20 who were part of the National Health Screening Program in 2009 and had no prior history of stroke, MI, or end-stage kidney disease.
Smoking information was self-reported and included age at initiation, current or former smoking status, and cumulative exposure in pack-years, defined as the product of packs of cigarettes smoked per day and the number of years smoked. Participants were categorized based on initiation age and smoking exposure. Additional analyses used alternative thresholds and a composite measure of pack-years divided by initiation age.
Baseline demographic, clinical, laboratory, and lifestyle data, including blood pressure, lipid levels, diabetes status, alcohol intake, physical activity, and socioeconomic status, were collected and used as covariates.
Participants were followed until incident MI, stroke, death, or the end of 2018. Cox proportional hazards models were used to estimate the hazard ratio (HR) for each outcome, adjusting for major cardiovascular risk factors and testing interactions between age at initiation and cumulative smoking exposure.
Among the study population, 40.1% had a history of smoking, and nearly one-quarter of smokers had started before the age of 20. Over approximately nine years of follow-up, all smoker groups showed higher probabilities of cardiovascular events and mortality compared with nonsmokers. The highest risks were observed in individuals who both started smoking early and accumulated heavy exposure of 20 or more pack-years.
Compared with nonsmokers, individuals who started smoking early and accumulated heavy exposure had more than double the risk of MI (HR 2.43), a markedly increased risk of stroke (HR 1.78), combined stroke or MI (HR 2.00), and elevated all-cause mortality (HR 1.82). These risks were significantly higher than those observed in smokers with similar pack-years who started smoking later in life.
A clear dose-response relationship was observed. Earlier initiation was linked to progressively higher cardiovascular risk, even after adjusting for total pack-years. Significant interactions indicated that the harmful effects of greater smoking exposure were amplified when smoking began at younger ages. These patterns were consistent across subgroups defined by sex, metabolic health, smoking status, and different exposure thresholds.
Associations with all-cause mortality were directionally similar but generally weaker than those observed for cardiovascular outcomes, particularly among younger participants. The authors note that this may reflect limited follow-up time for mortality endpoints.
This nationwide study demonstrates that starting smoking at a younger age substantially increases the risk of MI and stroke after statistical adjustment for cumulative smoking exposure, and that early initiation intensifies the cardiovascular harm associated with heavier smoking. These findings suggest heightened vulnerability from adolescence into early adulthood, while remaining consistent with an observational, non-causal interpretation.
Key strengths include the exceptionally large sample size, long follow-up, and detailed adjustment for clinical, behavioral, and socioeconomic confounders, allowing robust assessment of interactions between initiation age and smoking intensity.
However, limitations include reliance on self-reported smoking data, potential recall bias, lack of information on smoking changes over time or duration of cessation, and unmeasured confounders such as diet, family history, and genetic risk. The cohort was predominantly male and Asian, which may limit generalizability.
These findings indicate that preventing young people from starting smoking, particularly before the age of 20, could have substantial effects on reducing cardiovascular disease and premature death at the population level.
Posted in: Child Health News | Medical Science News | Medical Research News | Medical Condition News
Written by
Priyanjana Pramanik is a writer based in Kolkata, India, with an academic background in Wildlife Biology and economics. She has experience in teaching, science writing, and mangrove ecology. Priyanjana holds Masters in Wildlife Biology and Conservation (National Centre of Biological Sciences, 2022) and Economics (Tufts University, 2018). In between master's degrees, she was a researcher in the field of public health policy, focusing on improving maternal and child health outcomes in South Asia. She is passionate about science communication and enabling biodiversity to thrive alongside people. The fieldwork for her second master's was in the mangrove forests of Eastern India, where she studied the complex relationships between humans, mangrove fauna, and seedling growth.
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Pramanik, Priyanjana. (2026, January 25). Why the age you start smoking matters as much as how much you smoke. News-Medical. Retrieved on January 26, 2026 from https://www.news-medical.net/news/20260125/Why-the-age-you-start-smoking-matters-as-much-as-how-much-you-smoke.aspx.
MLA
Pramanik, Priyanjana. "Why the age you start smoking matters as much as how much you smoke". News-Medical. 26 January 2026.
USMNT Star's Potential Christian Pulisic-Type Leap Comes With a Risk
Fulham have reportedly made a bid to bring U.S. men's national team striker Ricardo Pepi to the Premier League despite his serious arm injury.
Pepi got 2025–26 off to a scintillating start, scoring 11 goals in 22 appearances for PSV Eindhoven. The 23-year-old then broke his arm in January and been on the long road to recovery since—a process that is expected to take two months.
The injury was not enough for Fulham to deter their interest in the American forward. According to ESPN, the Cottagers submitted a €32 million ($38 million) offer for Pepi's services.
The English outfit previously saw its €28 million ($33.3 million) bid rejected by PSV back in December. The reigning Dutch champions are thought to be looking for around €35 million ($41.6 million) for their attacker, who joined the club in 2023.
While many American stars are currently making a name for themselves throughout Europe, so few players of the current generation have impressed in the Premier League apart from Christian Pulisic. The USMNT captain bid farewell to Borussia Dortmund and joined Chelsea ahead of the 2019–20 season and went on to make history.
Pulisic made 145 appearances in his four seasons at Stamford Bridge, scoring 26 goals along the way. The winger won three trophies with Chelsea, including the 2020–21 Champions League title, a piece of silverware that came with a place in the competition's record books —Pulisic became the first American player to ever play in a Champions League final, and only the second to lift the trophy after Jovan Kirovski.
His time in a blue shirt was not always so blissful as that night at the Estádio do Dragão in Porto, Portugal. Recurring fitness struggles, inconsistent minutes and a carousel of managers and attacking personnel marred Pulisic's days at Chelsea, so much so that he eventually transferred to AC Milan ahead of the 2023–24 season.
Still, Pulisic—and now Antonee Robinson and Chris Richards—proved today's crop of impressive Americans can thrive in what is considered the most competitive league in the world, laying the groundwork for someone like Pepi to try and replicate their successes.
Should PSV and Fulham come to an agreement before the January transfer window closes for Pepi, the No. 9 is gambling big with his future. After all, prior to his injury, he was in the form of his life in the Netherlands, undoubtedly gaining the attention of USMNT boss Mauricio Pochettino.
A move to the Premier League takes most players time to adjust, especially ones working their way back to full match fitness. Returning to play for a new team in a much more difficult league after so much time on the sidelines is a massive challenge, one that could ultimately harm Pepi's chances of logging consistent minutes at this summer's 2026 FIFA World Cup.
Just look at what happened to Gio Reyna—the midfielder was regarded as one of the most exciting American talents, and between injuries and a horrible stint at Nottingham Forest, he saw his place in the Stars and Stripes' squad almost completely disappear.
Transferring to the Premier League five months before the World Cup is a risk for Pepi, who was looking like a surefire option to at minimum serve as Folarin Balogun's backup next summer. A failure to return to his goalscoring form and play consistent minutes at Fulham could incite Pochettino to look at other options, leaving Pepi as nothing more than an afterthought in the biggest tournament of his career.
Amanda Langell is a Sports Illustrated FC freelance writer and editor. Born and raised in New York City, her first loves were the Yankees, the Rangers and Broadway before Real Madrid took over her life. Had it not been for her brother's obsession with Cristiano Ronaldo, she would have never lived through so many magical Champions League nights 3,600 miles away from the Bernabéu. When she's not consumed by Spanish and European soccer, she's traveling, reading or losing her voice at a concert.
© 2026 ABG-SI LLC - SPORTS ILLUSTRATED IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ABG-SI LLC. - All Rights Reserved. The content on this site is for entertainment and educational purposes only. Betting and gambling content is intended for individuals 21+ and is based on individual commentators' opinions and not that of Sports Illustrated or its affiliates, licensees and related brands. All picks and predictions are suggestions only and not a guarantee of success or profit. If you or someone you know has a gambling problem, crisis counseling and referral services can be accessed by calling 1-800-GAMBLER.
The penultimate week of January saw intense weather cast a cold and snowy shadow over much of the continental United States, even as U.S. men's national team players saw their form heat up across Europe.
While MLS clubs took on preseason challenges in warmer destinations, plenty of American players had strong weeks in European action, taking starring roles in promotion battles, the Champions League and more.
With such consistent performances unfolding each week, USMNT manager Mauricio Pochettino's decisions for a March roster and World Cup squad have become even more challenging—no doubt, though, a welcome problem to have.
Here, Sports Illustrated ranks the top five performances of the week from American players across the globe.
There is a very realistic scenario that Aidan Morris cracks the USMNT roster for the World Cup and will be looking ahead to a Premier League debut season by the tournament's end.
While the 24-year-old former Columbus Crew academy product may not be putting up flashy attacking numbers—he has no goals and two assists in 23 matches with English Championship side Middlesbrough—he has been one of the most consistent players in the league.
This week saw him continue to thrive in a midfield pivot alongside 23-year-old English midfielder Hayden Hackney, where he finished all 33 of his attempted passes through a 61-minute showing in a 4–0 win over Preston North End.
Middlesbrough now sit second in the Championship in an automatic qualification spot and just three points behind table-topping Coventry City.
The USMNT's center back pool has immense depth and Mark McKenzie is making his case to start in the likely back three at the World Cup with his recent form in Ligue 1 with Toulouse.
This season, the 26-year-old has played 19 games, including his current streak of eight straight 90-minute performances across Ligue 1 and the Coupe de France. He is playing on the right side of a back three, a role that could be transferable to Pochettino's setup.
While continuing to stand out defensively this weekend, McKenzie helped Toulouse to a 2–0 win over Brest on Sunday, chipping in with an assist on Pape Demba Diop's opening goal, while ending the 90-minute shift with seven clearances and eight recoveries.
One of the most important players to the USMNT ahead of the World Cup, Chris Richards scored in his 100th appearance for Crystal Palace in a 3–1 loss to Chelsea in Sunday's Premier League action.
While the result saw the Eagles fall to 15th in the table, it was another solid performance from the American central defender as his club enters the final chapter of the Oliver Glasner managerial era. In addition to his first goal of the season, Richards made five defensive contributions and continued to grow into his left center back role.
Next week, he and Crystal Palace look to snap an 11-game winless streak across all competitions when they take on 17th-place Nottingham Forest.
Johnny Cardoso's efforts have started to pay off in more consistent performances with Atlético Madrid and this week saw the 24-year-old play 72 minutes in a 3–0 win over Mallorca, a side battling relegation.
After arriving from Real Betis in the summer, Cardoso had struggled to integrate himself into Diego Simeone's setup at the beginning of the season, but he has now started three of the team's last four matches.
Against Mallorca, the midfielder had 54 touches and six defensive contributions in a midfield pairing alongside 22-year-old Spanish midfielder Pablo Barrios. Cardoso didn't get on the scoresheet, but he had five passes into the final third and completed three long passes, according to FotMob.
That consistent showing came off another promising performance in midweek, as he did not misplace a pass in a 34-minute substitute appearance in Champions League action against Galatasaray.
Pochettino has a crowded player pool of American midfielders, but consistent minutes and strong showings from Cardoso should see him in the March camp and likely in the World Cup squad.
Since Luciano Spalletti took over as Juventus manager on Oct. 30, 2025, Weston McKennie's stock and form has only risen, and this week was no different across Champions League and Serie A action.
In the Bianconeri's midweek win over Benfica, he played one of his best games of the season, scoring his fifth goal of the campaign across all competitions while also creating two chances and chipping in with two recoveries in a right midfield role.
The win lifted Juventus to 12 points through seven Champions League league phase matches, putting them 15th in the table as they enter the final matchday against fellow American Folarin Balogun and Monaco.
The 27-year-old native of Little Elm, Texas followed his thrilling midweek performance with another strong showing in a 3–0 victory over Napoli on Sunday, where he took on a more attacking role and helped lead his team's frontline, which saw goals from Jonathan David, Kenan Yıldız and Filip Kostić.
Beaming with form and versatility, McKennie could prove to be one of the most important players this summer, despite once looking like a potential rotational player in Pochettino's setup.
Ben Steiner is an American-Canadian journalist who brings in-depth experience, having covered the North American national teams, MLS, CPL, NWSL, NSL and Liga MX for prominent outlets, including MLSsoccer.com, CBC Sports, and OneSoccer.
© 2026 ABG-SI LLC - SPORTS ILLUSTRATED IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ABG-SI LLC. - All Rights Reserved. The content on this site is for entertainment and educational purposes only. Betting and gambling content is intended for individuals 21+ and is based on individual commentators' opinions and not that of Sports Illustrated or its affiliates, licensees and related brands. All picks and predictions are suggestions only and not a guarantee of success or profit. If you or someone you know has a gambling problem, crisis counseling and referral services can be accessed by calling 1-800-GAMBLER.
Former FIFA president Sepp Blatter believes that fans should avoid traveling to the United States for the World Cup this summer.
The 89-year-old cited Mark Pieth, an anti-corruption expert and law professor who chaired the Independent Governance Committee to oversee FIFA's reform process from 2013 to 2016.
In a recent interview with Swiss newspaper Der Bund, Pieth said that President Donald Trump's international aggression and violations within the U.S. made it too risky for fans to travel from abroad.
"If we consider everything we've discussed, there's only one piece of advice for fans: Stay away from the USA!" Pieth said.
"You'll see it better on TV anyway. And upon arrival, fans should expect that if they don't please the officials, they'll be put straight on the next flight home. If they're lucky."
Blatter approvingly quoted Pieth in a post on X, adding: "I think Mark Pieth is right to question this World Cup."
The United States will serve as the co-host for the World Cup alongside Mexico and Canada, with the tournament running from June 11 to July 19.
Trump's aggressive posture toward Greenland recently led to calls for a boycott from European countries.
There has also been widespread criticism at home as federal agents have killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis, Minnesota this month.
The Trump administration's immigration crackdowns have led to fears that foreign visitors may stay home for the World Cup. Fans from Iran and Haiti are already unlikely to visit due to their inclusion among 39 countries whose citizens are banned from entry.
"The country itself is in a state of tremendous turmoil," Pieth said. "What we're witnessing domestically – the marginalization of political opponents, the abuses by immigration authorities, and so on – doesn't exactly entice a fan to travel there.
"The U.S. is in a similar security situation to Mexico. In Mexico, it's the drug cartels threatening violence; in the U.S., it's a state that's becoming increasingly authoritarian."
Blatter served as FIFA president for 17 years before he was forced out in the wake of a corruption scandal that erupted in 2015. He has frequently been critical of his replacement, Gianni Infantino.
GOAL continues its Meet the USMNT series by examining McKennie, a player at the center of a growing debate as he approaches a career crossroads.
A debate recently popped up on social media over whether Weston McKennie has already done enough to be considered the U.S. men's national team's best-ever midfielder. It's a discussion with reasonable arguments on both sides, but the very fact that it's happening speaks to just how good McKennie has been - and how much he has already accomplished in his career.
"So far" is key in that sentence because, at 27 years old, McKennie is just now reaching his prime. He's a key figure for one of the sport's biggest clubs, Juventus, and, with the World Cup on the horizon, he'll likely be a key part of that tournament, too, as the USMNT look to make a run on home soil.
This year promises to be a life-changing one for McKennie, for more reasons than one. His Juventus deal expires this summer, and his future is uncertain. He's set to be one of the faces of the USMNT, and perhaps the group's loudest personality, ahead of a home World Cup. And, if all goes to plan, he might just put a dent in that best-ever debate by the time 2026 is done, particularly if he continues how he's started this calendar year.
Ahead of the World Cup, GOAL is taking a look at the players that will make up the USMNT. Where did they come from? How are they playing? What should we expect from them next summer? Up next: meet Weston McKennie.
Previous Meet the USMNT: Christian Pulisic | Folarin Balogun|Chris Richards
McKennie was born in Fort Lewis, Washington, but that's not the environment that helped make him who he is. There were two of those places: Texas and Germany.
Largely raised in Little Elm, Texas, McKennie's soccer education, realistically, began during a three-year stay in Germany from age six to nine. His father, John, was an Air Force officer, and it was during that time that McKennie got his first real taste of high-level soccer.
Once back in the States, McKennie rose through the ranks at FC Dallas and the U.S. youth national team system, where he befriended future senior team teammates Christian Pulisic and Tyler Adams, among others. For a brief time, he committed to play at the University of Virginia. That never happened, though, as McKennie opted to return to Germany to begin his professional career with FC Schalke.
It took less than a year for the teenage McKennie to make it to Schalke's first team as he made his professional debut in May 2017 against Ingolstadt. His real breakthrough really came the next season, when he made 22 appearances in the Bundesliga to cement his place as one of the Bundesliga's top young players to watch. Among those watching? Italian megaclub Juventus, who swooped to sign the midfielder in 2020 after McKennie put together several strong seasons in Germany's top flight.
McKennie has reached new heights at Juventus, playing for one of the world's most famous clubs. At Juve, he's played alongside Cristiano Ronaldo, scored nine Champions League goals, and lifted three trophies, all while emerging as one of the USMNT's most important pieces through the 2022 World Cup cycle and beyond. It was at that 2022 World Cup that McKennie put in some of his best shifts as an international, famously going toe-to-toe with England's midfield in his second-ever World Cup game.
While largely successful, McKennie's run with Juventus has never been easy. Seemingly, every season, a new coach has come in who has wanted to get rid of him. Each time, McKennie has proved that the coach was wrong, firing his way right back into the team, only for the process to repeat again down the line.
Now, midway through this 2025-26 season, McKennie is at another crossroads. His contract with Juve expires after this season, and there are conflicting reports about what comes next. All of this comes with McKennie putting together his best season yet, particularly in the winter months, as the American has been in top, top form.
What comes next for McKennie is anyone's guess, but in the present, the midfielder is playing like one of the best in Serie A.
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After the U.S. missed the 2018 World Cup, the program handed the baton to a talented group of youngsters. The task was simple: build towards 2022, even if it means taking some lumps along the way. McKennie was part of that group called into that first Portugal friendly in November 2017. He's been integral ever since.
In total, McKennie has amassed 62 caps during that time, scoring 11 goals along the way. He's won three CONCACAF Nations League titles, a U.S. Soccer Player of the Year award and was named to CONCACAF's Best XI in 2021. At the 2022 World Cup, McKennie was ever-present, too, forming the MMA midfield alongside Adams and Yunus Musah to really set the tone for the U.S. on the world stage.
This second cycle has been a bit more up and down, with McKennie playing just four times in 2025, in particular. However, given his form, it's almost certain we see the 27-year-old midfielder contributing next summer.
As things stand, McKennie is something of a wild card for the World Cup. He's a player that can play a number of different positions; the question, at least from a USMNT perspective, is which one?
Is he an attacking midfielder alongside Pulisic? Can he hold down the fort next to Adams as a deeper-lying midfielder? Could he make a push for that right-wingback spot, particularly given his success as a right midfielder with Juventus in recent months? It's undoubtedly a difficult decision for manager Mauricio Pochettino, but one that likely doesn't have a wrong answer given McKennie's talent and confidence. Wherever he lines up at the World Cup, expect McKennie to be a player capable of making a difference at the highest level.
Liam Rosenior has made his first signing as Chelsea manager since replacing Enzo Maresca at the helm. The 41-year-old has enjoyed a bright start to life at Stamford Bridge, winning four of his first five games in charge of the Blues in all competitions. Rosenior is also working hard on shaping his squad and has added an exciting young talent to the ranks in west London.
Chelsea have won the race to sign Sheffield Wednesday teenager Yisa Alao. The 17-year-old also attracted interest from Manchester United and Liverpool but has opted for Chelsea in a transfer worth around £500,000 plus add-ons. Chelsea confirmed the transfer in a statement on the club's website: "Chelsea is pleased to announce the signing of Yisa Alao, with the left-back agreeing a contract with the Blues until 2028. The 17-year-old came through Sheffield Wednesday's academy and made his senior debut for the Owls in August. Alao has since played four more games, starting Wednesday's recent FA Cup tie against Brentford and Championship match against Portsmouth. Welcome to Chelsea, Yisa!"
Alao has said his goodbyes to Sheffield Wednesday with a post on social media that read: "10 years, endless memories, from the staff, to my teammates, to the fans, forever grateful. Thank you Sheffield Wednesday."
The club's administrators also posted an update regarding his sale: "The transfer includes a substantial upfront payment, along with further protections to ensure the club benefits should Yisa go on to fulfil the potential he has shown. These include performance-related payments and a significant sell-on arrangement. All financial terms will remain undisclosed.
"Our responsibility is to act in the best long-term interests of Sheffield Wednesday and its creditors. This transfer balances immediate value for the club with protection for the future, should Yisa's career develop as we all hope."
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Alao has only made five senior appearances so far in his career, meaning it may be a while before Chelsea fans see him in the first team. The teenager is expected to start off with the club's under-18 or under-21 squads or even potentially go out on loan in order to continue his development with regular minutes, per The Athletic. Alao is known for being an attack-minded full-back and has come all the way through the academy at Sheffield Wednesday. He made his debut as a 16-year-old against Bolton in the Carabao Cup and also played in the FA Cup this season as Wednesday were beaten by Premier League side Brentford.
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Alao's signing continues Chelsea's trend of going for young, exciting talents and the club will hope that he can go on and force his way into the first team. In the meantime, Rosenior and Chelsea are currently preparing for their final Champions League group fixture away at Napoli.
GOAL breaks down the key moments from USWNT players abroad, including a dominant performance from Tullis-Joyce for Manchester United.
As the U.S. Women's National Team cruised to a 6-0 win over Paraguay on Saturday in sunny Los Angeles, several key members of Emma Hayes' wider player pool were busy competing overseas. With January camp overlapping a FIFA competition window, the USWNT roster was made up exclusively of NWSL-based players, leaving many of the program's European contingent to continue their club seasons abroad.
In England, the Women's Super League title race remained tightly packed, with Americans on both sides of a marquee matchup between Chelsea and Arsenal. USWNT forward Alyssa Thompson and center back Naomi Girma featured for Chelsea against Arsenal defender Emily Fox, as the Blues hosted the Gunners in a match with major implications at the top of the table. Despite Chelsea generating chances, Arsenal came away with a 2-0 victory, powered by a standout performance from Beth Mead.
The result tightened the race behind league leaders Manchester City, who maintained their grip on first place over the weekend. City also welcomed a new American into the fold, as USWNT midfielder Sam Coffey made her debut after completing a January move. Coffey came on late in City's 2-1 win over London City Lionesses, helping see out the result as City extended their lead atop the WSL standings.
Elsewhere in England, goalkeeper Phallon Tullis-Joyce continued her strong run of form for Manchester United, playing a key role in a 4-1 win over Aston Villa. In France, young midfielder Lily Yohannes and veteran Lindsey Heaps were both involved as OL Lyonnes rolled to a 5-1 victory over Marseille in the Coupe de France Féminine.
From Thompson's duel with Fox to Coffey's first minutes in Manchester and another steady outing from Tullis-Joyce, GOAL takes a closer look at how USWNT players fared across Europe over the weekend.
It wasn't just an off day for Alyssa Thompson, who repeatedly found herself in promising positions in front of goal - Chelsea simply couldn't make their chances count. Hosting Arsenal, the Blues had an opportunity to close the gap on league leaders Manchester City, but defeat instead left their title hopes facing a steeper climb.
Arsenal, meanwhile, arrived at Kingsmeadow without a road win over Chelsea since 2018, making the result all the more surprising. The opening half was cagey, with Chelsea struggling to convert possession into clear looks in the final third, while Arsenal proved more clinical when their chances arrived.
Thompson, who has four league goals this season, entered the match firmly on Arsenal head coach Renée Slegers' radar as one of Chelsea's primary attacking threats.
“She's a really, really good player,” Slegers said ahead of the match. “She's made a great impact for Chelsea and really shown herself in the WSL, so we'll have to look out for her.”
Despite a lively start, Thompson was ultimately limited to only a handful of chances in a match that may have turned on a single decisive touch in the box.
Coffey's dream was to play abroad, and it became a reality over the weekend when she suited up for Manchester City for the very first time. Coffey, a staple midfielder on the USWNT squad made headlines when she left Portland Thorns FC in the NWSL, inking a deal with Man City Women through 2029.
Over the weekend, Coffey didn't earn a start, but came on in the second half at the 76th minute for Man City, helping them go nine points clear of Chelsea in the WSL, in their 2-1 result at London City.
“[Manchester City] is a club with so much history, so much success, so much influence in the city," Coffey said after her signing. "Manchester is not somewhere I've been before, but there's something about it that I felt I was led to and called to. I think it's also a place that has proven its investment in women's soccer and being a part of this movement that is going on. Seeing the facilities, the support the team gets, and all the efforts they are putting in for the women's side is such a huge and positive side and something I'm honoured to be a part of.”
Coffey is now part of a top-table team, Man City, who lead the WSL with 36 points in 12 wins.
Tullis-Joyce turned in another strong performance over the weekend, making six saves as Manchester United rolled past Aston Villa 4–1 in WSL play. The win lifted United into fourth place in the table on 25 points, just one behind Arsenal.
The USWNT goalkeeper has enjoyed a standout season for United, tallying 31 saves and four clean sheets as she continues to establish herself as a reliable presence at the club level. While Tullis-Joyce hasn't appeared for the U.S. since April 2025, her performances for Hayes' side during that stretch were enough to firmly place her among the top goalkeepers in the current pool.
“I feel strongly about Claudia [Dickey] and Phallon [Tullis-Joyce] at this time,” Hayes said ahead of the USWNT's friendlies against Paraguay and Chile, when asked about the goalkeeper picture.
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Fox was injured last weekend, so there wasn't clarity whether she'd be fit for the weekend match against Chelsea. To the Gunners' benefit, Fox was healthy and sharp coming out and keeping the Blues scoreless.
Fox helped Arsenal defeat Chelsea on the road, 2-0, and in the second half made a critical cross that was just short of her teammates to finish, and forced Chelsea goalkeeper Hampton to step up big, with just 15 minutes left of the game.
Fox has been a stalwart for Arsenal this season and will lace up to face Leicester City on Sunday.
Pulisic and McKennie had contrasting weekends Getty Images - Gabriele Maltinti/Getty Images and Valerio Pennicino/Getty Images
It was a case of dry spells, own goals and red cards for some — but momentum continued and lavish praise for others across Europe's U.S. contingent this weekend.
First things first, this is not a crisis. Christian Pulisic ranks fifth for goal contributions in Italy this season, and only Serie A top scorer Lautaro Martinez has more goals per 90 minutes than the American.
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The USMNT star had a scintillating start to the campaign, when he still managed eight league goals and two assists for Milan despite missing five games with a hamstring problem.
But in a league and team when he has so often been the leading light and most talked-about performer, things have been a little quiet lately.
Six league games have passed without a goal or assist for the 27-year-old, and on Sunday against Roma, his manager Max Allegri preferred to go with two up front, Christopher Nkunku and Rafael Leao, with Pulisic benched.
Milan settled for a -1- draw in the capital and Pulisic's 27 minutes on the field yielded minimal impact.
In context, five unspectacular games (he was not involved in the January 15 win at Como) are not overly worrying.
Forwards are not judged on their numbers alone — Bukayo Saka hasn't scored in the Premier League for leaders Arsenal since November.
And Pulisic, like the England international, has more than enough credit in the bank (and overall influence otherwise) to weather a dry spell.
With Milan second in the table, intent on securing a return to the Champions League next term at the minimum, while also in the title race with Inter, there is plenty to play for.
Plenty too for their talismanic top scorer to influence, as soon as his form from last year catches up with 2026.
What's the opposite of Super Sunday? Just ask Joe Scally and Auston Trusty.
The USMNT defenders have both been in good form for their clubs recently. Both have even contributed goals. But this weekend was one to forget. First, Scally got the ball rolling by bundling it into his own net as his team Borussia Monchengladbach lost 3-0 at home to Stuttgart.
Scally had already struggled after dealing inadequately with a cross, which let the high-flying visitors score their first.
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In Scotland, Trusty saved his own disappointing performance for a crucial game as Celtic faced league leaders Hearts.
He was below his own recent high standards before then being sent off in controversial circumstances on 77 minutes, after a VAR review of his foul on Pierre Landry Kabore as he burst through on goal.
The referee initially showed the American only a yellow, but the video assistant said it should be a red card. Obviously, Celtic manager Martin O'Neill did not agree and neither did former refereeing chief Dermot Gallagher on Sky Sports' Ref Watch.
For Borussia Monchengladbach, it's just one win and three defeats in their last five Bundesliga games, and for Trusty's Celtic, it was ground lost in their bid to overhaul Hearts. Worse too, rivals Rangers also pinched their second spot in the Scottish Premiership.
In the grand scheme of things, neither should be too downhearted. They are both regulars for their teams and neither games are representative of their seasons to date.
But they won't want to dwell on this weekend.
Juventus enjoyed a statement win over defending champions Napoli in Serie A on Sunday.
At the heart of the Turin side's 3-0 victory was their dependable USMNT midfielder Weston McKennie, still riding the high of his repeated Champions League heroics.
McKennie scored for the third European game in a row last week, and although he didn't get on the scoresheet against Napoli, he created two chances and prompted lavish praise from manager Luca Spalletti, who underlined the theory that the Texan can play pretty much anywhere.
“McKennie would be the perfect centre-forward,” an admiring Spaletti told Sky Italia. “He is one of the best there is in this role because he's always where the ball is. He fights for every ball.
“He's good in the air because he has this impressive leap, and he attacks the space in behind like nobody else. So we don't only have [Canadian international striker Jonathan] David. We also have McKennie, who does a bit of everything and does it well.”
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McKennie is the ultimate Swiss Army knife for his team, but being a jack of all trades is rarely to his detriment.
At the other end of the experience scale, Patrick Agyemang is taking the English Championship by storm.
The striker was on target again on Friday, getting Derby County's goal in a 1-1 draw with West Brom.
He now has eight goals — two in his last three games — during his debut season in England, and seems to be building momentum nicely as he reminds Mauricio Pochettino that it is not Haji Wright he must keep a close eye on in the English second tier during this World Cup year.
The Champions League first league phase draws to a close this week with plenty of American interest.
Folarin Balogun only got a yellow card for his troubles at the weekend with Monaco as they drew with Le Havre on Saturday, but he goes head-to-head with McKennie and Juve on Wednesday at Stade Louis II.
The French side could do with a win to secure progress to the qualifying round for the play-off stage, but Spalletti's side will be a tough obstacle.
Balogun, who has three goals in this season's Champions League, better bring his shooting boots. McKennie, chasing four in four, has certainly been wearing his. Tune in on Wednesday (3pm, Paramount +).
For Johnny Cardoso, who was back in the Atletico Madrid team for their 3-0 win over Mallorca at the weekend, it's the thorny task of Bodo/Glimt on Wednesday, the Norwegians who beat Manchester City last week. It will be an intriguing tie as the underdogs are still not totally out of contention for the play-offs, while Cardoso & Co are assured of a place (Wednesday, 3pm, Paramount +).
Keep an eye on Malik Tillman and Leverkusen, who need to beat second-bottom Villarreal to be certain of progress too (Wednesday, 3pm, Paramount +). PSV could also do with some Sergino Dest magic as they chase a vital win to make it through, although at least their opponents, Bayern, are second in the table (Wednesday, 3pm, Paramount +).
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In the Europa League, Auston Trust may have a chance to make immediate amends with Celtic as they take on Utrecht (Thursday, 3pm, Paramount +).
Then Tanner Tessmann and Lyon have been in strong Ligue 1 form, they've won four on the spin, and he has started the last two. The French side are sitting pretty at the top of the Europa League table, guaranteed to progress, but play Greece's PAOK on Thursday (3pm, Paramount +).
Last but not least, Sunday in the Premier League sees Chris Richards, who scored at the weekend in his 100th English top-flight appearance for Crystal Palace (the 3-1 defeat by Chelsea) take on Nottingham Forest (Peacock Premium, 7pm).
Greg O'Keeffe is a senior writer for The Athletic covering US soccer players in the UK & Europe.
Previously he spent a decade at the Liverpool Echo covering news and features before an eight-year stint as the paper's Everton correspondent; giving readers the inside track on Goodison Park, a remit he later reprised at The Athletic.
He has also worked as a news and sport journalist for the BBC and hosts a podcast in his spare time. Follow Greg on Twitter @GregOK
Front Row Soccer
www.frontrowsoccer.com
Gotham FC signed Florida State University forward and U.S. youth international Jordynn Dudley to a multi-year contract through the 2028 National Women's Soccer League season, the NWSL champions announced on Monday.
JERSEY CITY, N.J. – Gotham FC signed Florida State University forward and U.S. youth international Jordynn Dudley to a multi-year contract through the 2028 National Women's Soccer League season, the NWSL champions announced on Monday.
Dudley recently completed her junior season with powerhouse Florida State, concluding one of the most prolific collegiate careers in program history. In 53 matches, she recorded 30 goals and 29 assists, claiming two national championships and three All-American recognitions.
“I am so excited to join a championship-caliber organization like Gotham FC with a history of success,” Dudley said in a statement. “I know this environment will push my development every day, and I can't wait to compete alongside this incredible team. Thank you to Yael Averbuch West, Juan Carlos Amoros and everyone at Gotham for this opportunity. Let's go Gotham!”
Dudley, 21, capped her collegiate career as a national champion in 2025, winning the NCAA Division I Tournament for the second time after claiming the title as a freshman in 2023. She started all 22 matches during her junior season, totaling 11 goals and 14 assists, including three game-winning goals. Her third year earned her recognition as a finalist for the Missouri Athletic Club Hermann Trophy and All-Atlantic Coast Conference first team honors.
“Jordynn is a dynamic attacker who has shown the ability to impact games at a very high level,” Gotham FC general manager and head of soccer operations Yael Averbuch. “We're excited to add her to our attacking group and look forward to supporting her continued growth as a professional player.”
Her freshman season was equally impressive. Dudley finished the 2023 campaign with 14 goals, nine assists and 37 points, all second-most by a freshman in school history. She scored the opening goal in the NCAA tournament against Stanford University, helping Florida State to a 5-1 victory. She was named ACC freshman of the year and NCAA Tournament offensive most outstanding player and earned All-ACC freshman team honors.
Across her three collegiate seasons, Dudley was named a Hermann Trophy semifinalist each year, a three-time All-ACC first team selection, a two-time All-ACC tournament team honoree (2023, 2024) and a three-time United Soccer Coaches All-American.
Dudley, who hails from Milton, Ga. has represented the United States at the youth international level, including with the Under-20 team at the FIFA U-20 Women's World Cup in 2024. She made five appearances, including two starts, scoring two goals – highlighted by a 98th-minute strike to lift the U.S. to a come-from-behind quarterfinal win over Germany. Last January, Dudley received her first U.S. women's national team call-up.
Front Row Soccer editor Michael Lewis has covered 13 World Cups (eight men, five women), seven Olympics and 28 MLS Cups. He has written about New York City FC, New York Cosmos, the New York Red Bulls and both U.S. national teams and has penned a soccer history column for the Guardian.com. Lewis, who has been honored by the Press Club of Long Island and National Soccer Coaches Association of America, is the former editor of BigAppleSoccer.com. He has written seven books about the beautiful game and has published ALIVE AND KICKING The incredible but true story of the Rochester Lancers. It is available at Amazon.com.
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FIFA is boosting women's football. The winner of the first edition of the Women's Champions Cup will receive $2.3 million, the largest single payout ever awarded in women's club football to date. The runner-up will earn $1 million.
Each club eliminated in the semifinals will receive $200,000 for its participation, while teams knocked out in the first and second rounds will each earn $100,000.
FIFA Secretary General Mattias Grafström said that “the distribution of nearly $4 million in total among the six participants based on performance is a clear statement of confidence in women's club football and in the players, teams, and competitions that are driving its continued growth.”
“It reflects the growth of women's football worldwide and FIFA's commitment to making targeted, meaningful investments to strengthen women's club football over the long term. Our objective is clear: to continue investing in women's club football and accelerating its growth, ensuring that opportunities, visibility, and value keep pace with the exceptional performances we see on the pitch,” Grafström added.
FIFA also recalled that “the Women's Champions Cup is part of a broader investment and collaboration strategy aimed at strengthening women's club football around the world.”
It highlighted the $11.3 million distributed to 1,041 clubs following the 2023 Women's World Cup, as well as the creation of the Women's Club World Cup, whose first edition is scheduled for 2028.
The final stage of the inaugural edition will be held in London from January 28 to February 1. On the opening day, Gotham FC (United States) will face Corinthians at Brentford's stadium, followed by a match between Arsenal and Morocco's FAR.
The Arsenal stadium will then host the third-place match and the final, where the first champion will be crowned.
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The U.S. is expecting at least 5 million international visitors, not to mention the millions of soccer fans at home, to be on the move during the six-week tournament
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More than half a billion ticket requests have been made for World Cup 2026 games, which will be hosted by cities across the United States, Canada and Mexico, FIFA reported this month.
The U.S. is expecting more than 5 million international visitors, not to mention the tens of thousands of soccer fans here at home, who will not only pack stadiums but also flood fan zones from coast to coast, including in New York, Los Angeles, Kansas City and Atlanta, over the six-week tournament, which kicks off on June 11.
This once-in-a-generation opportunity also brings a nationwide, multifaceted rollout of security measures to prepare for potential threats ranging from drone incursions to cyberattacks.
However, some human rights advocates have expressed fears that the Trump administration will use law enforcement operations around the World Cup to target migrants as part of the White House's aggressive deportation policy.
“Under the Trump administration's policies, immigration enforcement at major sporting events can tear families apart and could expose people fleeing persecution to life-threatening danger,” Minky Worden, director of global initiatives at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.
And there is also trepidation from fans traveling from abroad after the Trump administration broadened its visa ban to 75 countries.
Despite announcing the FIFA Priority Appointment Schedule System, or FIFA PASS, which will expedite visa processing for individuals cleared by the Department of State, FIFA fans from around the world are still questioning whether or not they'll be allowed to enter and travel within the U.S. without federal harassment, according to the BBC.
The Department of Homeland Security announced earlier this month that it plans to invest $115 million in counter-drone technologies to protect World Cup games, and also events celebrating the country's 250th anniversary this year.
The funds will be managed by a new DHS office that will focus on buying and deploying drone and counter-drone tech.
“Drones represent the new frontier of American air superiority,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement.
FEMA, which is under the umbrella of DHS, said in December that it had allocated $350 million to the 11 states hosting World Cup matches. That money is earmarked for the purchase of counter-drone tech.
While most drones are more disruptive than they are overtly dangerous — though there have been cases of falling devices causing serious injury to people on the ground — the war in Ukraine has proven that even relatively inexpensive, commercially available racing drones, outfitted with explosives, can be used as potent weapons.
U.S. officials reportedly see the potential threat of a drone attack as more than a fringe possibility.
Last week, leaders from the military, law enforcement, and local governments gathered to participate in "tabletop exercises overwhelmingly focused" on drone attacks at World Cup events, where large numbers of people will be gathered in places at predetermined times.
Politico reported about the war games that local and state law enforcement agencies in the U.S. have been “encouraged to purchase equipment that can jam inbound drones or redirect them to their origin," and to seek reimbursement for their purchases through a $500 million federal grant program.
The World Cup is larger than it has ever been. In all, 48 teams are competing in more than a dozen cities across three North American countries. Like the rest of the world, the World Cup relies more on automated systems and digital technologies today than it ever has in the past.
That means that cyberthreats are more of risk factor than ever before.
"The more we build out these things and automate and scale larger — more days, more games, more teams — the more we have to find a way to do that efficiently, and they're not scaling out the human labor force to do it," Chris Grove, director of cybersecurity strategy for Nozomi Networks, a provider of cybersecurity for operational technology told Dark Reading, a cybersecurity news site.
"They're building with technologies and processes and things, automated ticketing access controls, and being able to do a lot more with less."
Digital threats aren't just a theorized vector for malicious behavior; there is precedent. Following the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, analysts found a router that had been compromised and could have been used to disrupt communications during the games, including all streaming services carrying the events.
In 2024, the Olympic Games in Paris were subject to at least 140 cyberattacks, but thanks to French preparation, there were no outages to the games, according to Dark Reading.
Grove warned that this year, as a result of heightened political polarization in the U.S., there will likely be an increased likelihood of "hacktivists" targeting the World Cup to make statements.
"I think there's more potential and concern for disruption around hacktivists this time around than four years ago," he says. "Four years ago was just a different political and social landscape."
Donald Lane, a former Secret Service agent, told the U.S. Sun that while physically attacking an event has become more difficult thanks to increased surveillance and threat-detection technology, malicious actors have found plenty of vulnerabilities through the use of remote access.
“Bad actors are realizing they can cause a lot of destruction by accessing these things remotely, which can be just as devastating as a physical attack," he told the outlet.
Targeting systems that manage electricity, gas, and water are all possible options for potential bad actors.
Little information has been released about the specific steps to ramp up cybersecurity ahead of the World Cup but a House Committee task force — focused on the World Cup and 250th anniversary celebrations — has indicated that it is among the chief areas of concern.
Last summer, Andrew Giuliani, who is leading the White House Task Force on the World Cup, announced that the federal government was pouring more than a billion dollars into security for the tournament, calling it "one of the largest commitments of safety resources ever made for a single event."
"This includes $625 million through the FIFA World Cup Grant Program and is directed to support law enforcement, supporting everything from training and exercises to cybersecurity and emergency response,' he said.
Securing the physical locations of games will fall largely to a combined force of federal, state and local law enforcement.
Kansas City has already started its preparations, naming Kyle Postell, as the city's director of safety & security. Postell is a former Secret Service agent and will oversee security preparations alongside local law enforcement.
World Cup hosting cities will likely see increased police presence, controlled traffic corridors, and the presence of state and federal law enforcement as has been seen before during major events like the Super Bowl.
After a New Year's Day vehicle attack in New Orleans that killed 14 people in 2025, police used reinforced “drop and stop” metal barriers ahead of the Super Bowl in the city.
The barriers used in New Orleans advertise the ability to stop a 2,430 pound (1102 kg) vehicle moving at 30 miles per hour (48 kph) without the need for an anchor.
Cities across the U.S. have been investing in similar barriers since the New Year's Day attack. West Palm Beach spent $800,000 in 2025 to protect its pedestrian-heavy downtown events, according to WPTV. San Antonio did the same in 2025, but used two-ton stone barriers to block vehicle entry to its Market Square, News 4 San Antonio reports.
In addition to securing the actual venues, the U.S. is also preparing for non-American travelers who come from cultures where public transportation is more the norm. Giuliani said that the federal government is working with public and private partners to ensure foreign visitors have safe and reliable transportation to and from events.
"The Department of Transportation is very aware that Americans travel differently from Europeans and South Americans, and we are working shoulder-to-shoulder with FIFA, host cities, airlines, Amtrak, rideshare companies, and public transportation networks to keep fans moving safely and efficiently," Giuliani said in December.
Michael Donnelly, Georgia's TSA federal security director, said officials at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, in host city Atlanta, are preparing for a massive influx of foreign and domestic travelers.
"It's going to be an extremely, busy time when we have games," he told Fox 5 Atlanta. "So we'll be preparing like every game is a Super Bowl."
He said that the TSA would be utilizing unspecified "new technologies" to help with screening and expedite wait times as travelers arrive.
The Trump administration's aggressive anti-immigration policy – which has seen nearly 3 million people deported and thousands arrested by masked ICE agents and held in detention centers – appears to have left foreign visitors wondering what welcome awaits them in the U.S.
In December, Giuliani was asked by reporters if Trump will rule out ICE raids at World Cup games. He said Trump would not.
“The one thing, and I've known the president for 25 years, the president has not ruled out anything that will make American citizens safer,” he said.
In January, Lebanese diplomat and FIFA fan Mohamad Safa, announced he'd canceled his World Cup tickets because of the Trump administration's draconian anti-immigration policies.
“I cancelled my World Cup tickets. The ICE may decide that I am a gang member, and I'll be locked in prison for a year with no charges, no hearing, no trial, no right to consult a lawyer, no phone call,” he wrote in a post on X. “The US is not safe to visit.”
The Department of Homeland Security proposed a rule in January that would expand the personal and social media information travelers are required to provide DHS officials when traveling to the U.S. on the waived visa program.
The waived visa program applies to citizens of many European countries and other American allies. The DHS proposal means those visitors may be subjected to expanded scrutiny.
If implemented, the new proposal would give Homeland Security the ability to screen travelers' social media posts for any sign of "anti-American" sentiment, even if they aren't seeking long-term stays in the U.S.
Trump has said that he "can't wait to welcome soccer fans from all over the globe” but has already banned visa applications for visitors from 21 nations including Iran, Brazil, Colombia, and Egypt — which all have teams in the World Cup or competing to qualify for the event.
While exceptions have been made for World Cup teams, their immediate families, and coaching staff, the same cannot be said of their supporters.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned soccer fans that just because they bought a ticket to a game doesn't mean they're getting into the U.S. “A ticket is not a visa and it doesn't guarantee admission to the U.S.," he said.
Trump's immigration crackdown is a concern for domestic fans as well. In July, an asylum seeker in the U.S. took his children to a Club World Cup soccer tournament final and was arrested by ICE, detained for three months, and was then deported to a country where he felt he could be killed, according to Human Rights Watch.
In May, two months before the incident, HRW sent a letter to FIFA asking for “immediate action” to address potential risks to fans posed by U.S. immigration policies.
FIFA responded on June 3 that it “expects … host countries take measures to ensure that any eligible persons who are involved in the Competition are able to enter the respective countries,” and “is actively working on this matter with relevant authorities.”
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There haven't been many periods of great optimism at Manchester United in the post-Sir Alex Ferguson era, but for a brief moment at the start of 2019, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer made supporters believe again. He delivered eight successive wins after replacing Jose Mourinho as interim manager, including a stunning 3-1 victory at Arsenal in the FA Cup fourth round, bringing back the scintillating counter-attacking style Ferguson championed throughout his glorious 26-year reign.
Solskjaer eventually earned the permanent role, and remained at the helm for almost three years, guiding United to a runners-up finish in 2020-21 and a Europa League final. But the beloved former striker lost control in the end, and left Old Trafford without adding another piece of silverware to his glittering career CV.
The consensus now is that United must avoid making the same mistake with Michael Carrick, who was installed as interim boss after Ruben Amorim's sacking at the start of the month. "I think if United win every game from now until the end of the season, I still wouldn't be giving him the job," Roy Keane said on Sky Sports this weekend. "I just think they need a bigger, more experienced manager, it's as simple as that."
Gary Neville added: "I think it's right that Carrick keeps the job until the end of the season and then hands the baton over to a [Thomas] Tuchel or a [Carlo] Ancelotti, someone of that world-class ilk." However, not every United legend sees it the same way.
Keane and Neville were trying to temper expectations after watching Carrick's Red Devils beat Arsenal 3-2 at the Emirates on Sunday, one week after their statement derby win over Manchester City, but Wayne Rooney couldn't help but be swept up in the euphoria. "Of course, he can [be the right man for the job if he continues like this]," he said to BBC Match of the Day. "He's got the opportunity to show everyone, and the club, that he's capable of doing the job. And if he carries on like this, there'll be massive pressure on the United board to put him in at the end of the season. I know they've been there with Ole before, but I think this feels a little bit different."
Rooney's conclusion rings true. United have handily beaten the two best teams in the league after being unshackled by Carrick, and destiny is in his own hands. The INEOS ownership regime will certainly find itself backed into a corner if Carrick now oversees a late tilt at the title, which, crazy as it might sound, is a genuine possibility in a season that has already been so wildly unpredictable.
Indeed, chants of "we're gonna win the league" rang out in the visitors' stand after United's triumph in north London, which was their first away to the Gunners in the Premier League since 2017. It was also Arsenal's first home defeat since May 2024, and the first time they have conceded more than two goals in a league game since December 2023.
The significance of the final result, then, should not be downplayed. A major mentality shift has taken place in the United dressing room. They found themselves 1-0 down when Lisandro Martinez inadvertently put through his own net after Arsenal had dominated for a good half hour, and probably would have buckled from there had Amorim still been on the touchline.
But Carrick did not allow his players' heads to drop. United responded brilliantly, harrying the Gunners into uncharacteristic mistakes at the back - one of which was punished before the interval, as Bryan Mbeumo pounced on a misplaced Martin Zubimendi pass, calmly rounded David Raya, and side-footed the ball into the net.
Five minutes into the second half, they were in front, with Patrick Dorgu doing his best impression of Tony Yeboah when cracking a brilliant volley in off the crossbar. United continued to look dangerous on the break thereafter, but also seemed to relish every tackle and interception as they defended in numbers to frustrate Arsenal.
Even after the hosts found a scrappy equaliser through Mikel Merino in the 84th minute, Carrick urged his team to push for another goal. The Red Devils were fearless, and Matheus Cunha's remarkable late winner was no less than they deserved. To beat Raya from 30 yards is no mean feat, and Cunha's curling shot was truly unstoppable, reflecting the new confidence surging through the United squad.
This was not the same all-conquering display as United put on in the derby, where they managed seven shots on target and restricted City to zero, while also seeing three goals ruled out. City were fortunate the final scoreline was only 2-0 at Old Trafford and not five or six.
Carrick was well aware that facing Arsenal at the Emirates would be a greater test of his side's resolve, but they passed with flying colours. "It was a tough game for us today. I think we knew that coming into it. It was never going to be the perfect kind of game for us," he admitted. "We've been together less than two weeks so we knew coming here we were going to have to draw on many different things to get a performance and a result. It was up and down at times, there's some really good things in the game for us, things we can work on, but the way the boys were, their belief, the confidence and the spirit, everything that came together made me really proud today."
No one embodied that spirit more than Cunha, who was decisive off the bench for the second week running. Carrick made the bold decision to stick with Dorgu on the left wing, which could easily have gone down like a lead balloon, but Cunha was once again chomping at the bit.
"When Matheus came on, I just fancied him to score, to make an impact. Fantastic finish," said Carrick. "He epitomises what, as a group, we've been like this week. He has not started both games, but he's had a real big impact. He's been disappointed not to start, but he's used that in a really good way."
Carrick also opted to stick with Mbeumo upfront over Benjamin Sesko, despite the latter's potential to upset Arsenal from a physical standpoint, and it paid off. Mbeumo stretched and unsettled the Gunners' backline with his pace and awareness. It bodes well that Carrick already has a strong sense of how United can cause maximum damage, and has everyone pulling in the same direction, regardless of whether or not they are selected to start.
Carrick has also sparked an instant improvement in several players, most notably Dorgu. For so long, the former Lecce man looked like a dud signing, having been snapped up for £25 million ($34m) by Amorim last January, managing only one goal in his first 30 appearances.
But the Dane has scored twice in as many games since Carrick's arrival, finally proving his worth after being shifted from wing-back to the left of the attack. "Pat's been a big player for us over the last couple of games attacking-wise - he's scored two goals, but in terms of his threat and athleticism and his quality coming in as well," Carrick said after the Arsenal game. "He ended up coming off with a little bit of cramp, hopefully it's nothing worse. At this stage it's hard to tell, so we'll just have to wait and see, but we're hoping it's not too bad."
The fact that there is so much concern around Dorgu's fitness underlines how far he's come in such a short space of time. Meanwhile, academy jewel Kobbie Mainoo - unforgivably ostracised by Amorim - also impressed on his second successive start alongside the 33-year-old Casemiro, who has rolled back the years to become a lynchpin for United, Harry Maguire has been colossal at the back, Amad Diallo is exerting more influence higher up the pitch and Bruno Fernandes is again serving as creator-in-chief after being restored to his favoured No.10 berth.
Carrick has not done anything particularly ground-breaking. He has just gone for a 4-3-2-1 that suits United far better than Amorim's perplexing 3-4-3 and put the players in their strongest positions. Now they attack with proper width and verve, and defend in a compact shape; a simple but effective formula for success.
For most supporters, the enduring memory of Amorim will be him fiddling with a magnetic tactics board like a mad scientist during the shocking Carabao Cup loss to Grimsby back in August. The Portuguese overcomplicated everything, and obviously didn't understand the much-debated United 'DNA'. Carrick does, though, and that's why he's commanded instant respect.
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Carrick is also a far more composed and hands-on coach than Amorim. His predecessor was honest to a fault, prone to emotional outbursts in front of the media that distracted from the team's efforts on the pitch.
According to the Manchester Evening News, Amorim sometimes preferred to observe in training sessions, but Carrick is always involved. He has also made sessions shorter and more intense, with a greater focus on individual work, and the players have responded positively.
"Carrick's been brilliant with us, he's brought a fresh energy in, the group's really galvanised," Maguire said to Sky Sports on Sunday. The former United midfielder had a similar effect in his unbeaten three-game stint in the dugout between November and December in 2021, leaving a lasting impression on Fernandes in particular. "He knows how to speak, he knows a lot of football," the former Sporting CP playmaker said at the time. "He was one of the great players that not a lot of people talk about. From what I have seen, he can be a top coach."
In the last five years, Carrick has not done quite enough to make good on Fernandes' prediction, despite a largely encouraging spell at Middlesbrough, but he could be put into the "top coach" bracket if United's resurgence lasts through to May. This doesn't have to be Groundhog Day; Carrick appears better equipped to handle the pressures of perhaps the hottest seat in world football than Solskjaer was, and a flawless finish to the campaign would provide Sir Jim Ratcliffe and INEO with incontrovertible evidence of his credentials.
Rooney visited Carrington last week to get a feel for the atmosphere Carrick and his staff have been building before United's "absolutely incredible performance" against the Gunners. "There's a calmness about the place," the Red Devils' record goalscorer said on the latest episode of the Wayne Rooney Show. "You've got all the coaching staff all there watching the under-18s play. And then again, on a Saturday morning, they're all there watching the under-16s play after the training session.
"These are all things which used to happen in the past and it makes a big difference. In my eyes, they have taken a step towards getting the club back a little bit closer to where they used to be when the club was successful. What I saw, not just from Michael, but the other coaches, Johnny Evans as well, is a real calmness and a belief. Michael told me how good the players were and he felt he had to stop the session early because they were that good and he wanted to bottle it up."
Carrick, Steve Holland, Jonathan Woodgate and Evans were all sat in the same section as Wayne to watch his son Kai make his Old Trafford debut on Friday, with the 16-year-old coming on as a substitute in a 2-1 extra-time win over Derby County in the FA Youth Cup. They all recognise the importance of preserving the club's proud youth development record, unlike Amorim, who did not attend a single academy match in his 14-month tenure.
Jose Mourinho was also criticised for appearing to neglect those foundations, and there is a risk it could happen again if they go for another foreign coach, but not with Carrick; he's already acting like a model long-term manager. If INEOS want stability, Carrick may well be the standout candidate to succeed Amorim.
Carrick has given himself a real chance of earning an extended stay, but he can guarantee it by bringing the Premier League title back to Old Trafford. United are still 12 points behind current leaders Arsenal, but Mikel Arteta's side have only picked up two points from their last three games, and the nerves that derailed their previous title bids appear to be setting in.
Arsenal don't have the swagger of champions; they have become far too reliant on set-pieces and their frontline is suffering in open play because of it. Second-placed City are enduring similar struggles in the final third amid a worrying injury crisis, while no one expects Unai Emery's over-achieving Aston Villa to stay the course in third.
All three of those clubs are having to juggle commitments across multiple competitions, too, which gives United a clear advantage. Carrick only has 15 games left to prepare for, and in theory, his team should be fresher than the majority of their opponents.
Aside from home matches against Aston Villa and Liverpool and a trip to Chelsea, their fixture schedule is also favourable. Another win against Fulham at Old Trafford next weekend could see United emerge as dark horses, with Arsenal facing a tricky trip to an improving Leeds side and City traveling to Tottenham, who have beaten them in three of their last four meetings.
Perhaps privately, Carrick will be taking inspiration from United's class of 1996, who were 12 points adrift of Newcastle after 23 games, but pulled off a miraculous turnaround to clinch the title by four points. Champions League qualification should only be the minimum aim for the Red Devils now that they are back in the top four; they have the quality to push for the ultimate prize.
Although Arsenal are still favourites because of their superior strength in depth, United are gathering momentum. If they can keep up their newfound level and adapt when needed against the so-called lesser teams that play with a low block, anything is possible. Carrick's at the wheel, and so far, it just feels right.
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Pep Guardiola has taken a bizarre dig at his own Manchester City players while quoting his “idol”, Johan Cruyff. The demanding Catalan coach worked under the iconic Dutchman during his playing days at Barcelona. Many of the lessons he took back then have been implemented into his own coaching career. Guardiola is now renowned for demanding nothing but the best, and absolute commitment, from all of those working alongside him.
The 55-year-old has never been the type of character to look for excuses, with his remarkable CV built on hard work and determination. Those traits are expected to be adopted by anyone that forms part of his playing and coaching staff.
Guardiola wants to see everyone give their all for the good of the collective cause, with it imperative that they pull in the same direction. When it comes to injuries, that means playing through the odd knock and ignoring any bumps and bruises.
City's highly-decorated manager is not convinced that everybody at the Etihad Stadium is towing that line this season, with fitness problems providing plenty of unfortunate headaches in the 2025-26 campaign.
Guardiola told reporters after seeing the Blues beat Premier League basement dwellers Wolves 2-0, with Erling Haaland being rested from the start in that contest: “We have incredible doctors, incredible physios, [working] 24 hours [a day]. I believe Johan Cruyff - my mentor, my idol, my everything. When he said to me ‘when a player doesn't [want to] be injured, they will not be injured'.
“There are situations [where they are] unlucky, but when you are incredible [in shape] and you don't want to be injured, you will not be injured. Unfortunately we have a lot, that is the problem that we have right now.”
Josko Gvardiol, Mateo Kovacic, John Stones, Ruben Dias, Nico Gonzalez and Savinho are among those currently nursing knocks at the Etihad. They will play no part in a Champions League clash with Galatasaray on Wednesday.
Guardiola said when delivering a selection update ahead of that contest, with a couple of January signings also set to be ineligible against Turkish opposition: “We need our fans, we need them. I know Marc (Guehi) cannot play, Antoine (Semenyo) cannot play, Rodri cannot play, apart from all the players that we have sidelined. Nico Gonzalez will not be ready and Savinho will not be ready and John Stones will not be ready.”
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One player that does epitomise the spirit that Guardiola wants to see is Portuguese playmaker Bernardo Silva. He is seeing his contact run down towards free agency, but a summer departure is not guaranteed.
Guardiola said of still having the classy 31-year-old - who is City's club captain - at his disposal: “I would love for Man City, for myself as well, if Bernardo could to stay forever. But we spoke a lot with Bernie and Bernie has to decide the best for him and for his family.
“Whatever happens, this season, next season, in 10 years, he will remain one of the greatest players that this club has had in its long history.
“He will be undroppable. Undroppable. I cannot. When I decide to play Bernardo in the team, I go to bed and I sleep better. I have to take care of my health, you know? He's a competitor. He has fire in his eyes still. Hopefully he can contaminate and can inoculate this fire to the rest of the group.
“How he defends every single ball, how he reads what he has to do. And you know, the guy who creates excuses forgets his mistakes. And he never finds excuses. Never. And that's why he's a special, special player.”
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After facing Galatasaray in European competition, with automatic qualification for the Champions League last 16 still up for grabs, City will travel to Tottenham on Sunday in the Premier League. They are now just four points adrift of leaders Arsenal after seeing the Gunners drop three points against Manchester United in their latest outing.
The FIFA World Cup 2026 is set to be a monumental event, with 104 matches, including 72 in the group Stage and 32 in the knockouts, spanning 16 host cities across Canada, Mexico, and the United States.
As fans look ahead to the opening match on June 11, 2026, at Mexico City's Estadio Azteca and the final on July 19, 2026, at the New York New Jersey Stadium, the regional hospitality industry is already seeing huge shifts in room pricing.
While the matches are distributed across the continent, certain cities are taking a larger share of the action. Dallas (Arlington) leads with 9 matches, followed closely by Atlanta, Los Angeles, and New York/New Jersey with 8 matches each.
Understanding how hotel prices are evolving across these diverse host sites is essential for maximizing revenue, having now moved from the pre-draw phase, closer to the start of the tournament.
Across host cities, revenue managers are shifting from typical pricing patterns toward more aggressive strategies that capitalize on the official tournament draw and the resulting supply-demand compression.
As fans around the globe mark their calendars for the FIFA World Cup 2026, the hospitality market is already reacting to the anticipated surge in demand.
A key inflection point for hotel pricing was the official tournament draw, which dictates where teams will be playing, and which fans will be supporting.
By analyzing hotel price data across host cities during both the pre-draw and post-draw periods, we can uncover how markets adjust when supporters know where their team will be in the group stages and where they may end up in the knockout round if their team advances.
The shift from the pre-draw period to the post-draw period for the group stage revealed a market in flux, characterized by widespread price hikes and extreme variations per city.
Across all host destinations, there was a clear upward trend in costs as the tournament logistics became concrete.
While the aggregate market lift across all destinations was 13.74%, the mean percentage increase per city was higher at 14.75%, driven by more dramatic spikes in some cities.
The top five markets for room price increases from pre-draw to post-draw for the group stage are centered in Mexico and the South of the USA, all moving well above the 14.75% average:
On the flip side, the least volatile market was Philadelphia experiencing only a 3.25% increase.
While percentage increases tell one story, the absolute price points reveal a staggering gap between the most and least expensive cities.
In both periods, the costliest destination was more than six times the price of the most affordable one.
Vancouver solidified its spot as the most expensive host city for the group stage, with average rates rising from $1,106.38 (pre-draw) to $1,228.62 (post-draw).
Houston remained the most affordable option throughout, with prices moving from $179.68 to $225.20.
On average, the price for a stay across all destinations rose from $438.30 to $498.54, a jump of $60.24 or 13.74%.
As the tournament progresses into the knockout stages, the pricing behavior shifts once more.
While the group stages saw broad volatility, the knockout rounds show a more concentrated surge in specific markets while others maintain surprising stability. While every destination saw some level of increase, the range of volatility was even more pronounced here than in the group stages.
Conversely, some cities remained remarkably consistent and saw the smallest percentage changes, suggesting that their high baseline prices were already baked in early on:
Interestingly, the hierarchy of room prices remained largely unchanged between the two periods for the knockout stage, perhaps reflecting the fact that supporters do not yet know for sure where their team will be. The cities that were expensive before the draw stayed expensive after.
Post-draw (as of 12/1/26) these three maintained their exact ranking:
Ultimately, the average advertised price increase across all host destinations for the knockout period, comparing late 2025 to early 2026, stands at 10.56%.
Whether you are hosting early group stage fixtures or a later stage game, the data suggests there is now significant room price movement following the draw and you should analyse the predictive data from your market and get a strategy in place if you haven't already.
By tracking room price evolution from 350 days out to both group and knockout stages, we can see how initial baseline rates have been aggressively adjusted to reflect the true supply-demand compression of both the group and knockout stages.
Tracking the group stage price evolution from 350 days out to 147 days out shows a dramatic shift in the hierarchy of the cost of rooms per city.
While some cities remained stable, others experienced triple-digit percentage growth as the event moved from a distant date to a reality.
The most striking finding in this period is the sheer magnitude of price jumps in specific markets.
The timing of these price peaks tells you lot about varying market confidence.
As we move closer to the event, the most expensive room price leaderboard has been reshuffled.
Most expensive to least expensive host cities when the event was approximately 350 days away:
Most expensive to least expensive host cities when the event was approximately 147 days away:
Guadalajara experienced one of the biggest leaps, moving from 14th most expensive to 6th most expensive, climbing 8 positions.
New York, which was the most expensive city at lead time 350, dropped to 5th most expensive at lead time 147, while Vancouver jumped from 3rd most expensive to most expensive.
The room price evolution for the knockout rounds, tracked from 350 days down to 164 days before the knockout stage begins, highlights markets that have become increasingly polarized between high-cost stability and low-cost volatility.
While the average price increase across all 16 cities was approximately 79.9%, there was explosive price growth in Mexican cities and Kansas:
Conversely, the US East and West Coasts remained the most stable and saw the lowest levels rise during this period:
By looking at average prices and standard deviation, we can categorize some of the host cities into four risk/value quadrants which demonstrate the power and variation of local market dynamics when a big event is in town:
Most expensive to least expensive host cities when the event was approximately 350 days away:
Most expensive to least expensive host cities when the event was approximately 164 days away:
The pricing hierarchy for the knockout stages underwent a significant recalibration over the 186-day observation window, as more localized market dynamics, and the lack or influx of knockout games for each city came into play:
This realignment of rankings is closely tied to the specific lead-time windows where demand begins to saturate available inventory.
Currently, the data indicates that most destinations hit their peak pricing within a narrow window between 164 and 173 days, roughly 5.5 to 6 months before the event.
While general price trends give us a macro view of the market, the real ‘event tax' is best seen when comparing match days to non-match days.
This granular analysis reveals exactly how much more fans are paying to be in the city on the night of a match versus the surrounding dates.
Across the board, the data confirms, unsurprisingly, that game days are universally more expensive.
In every host city, match nights consistently command a premium over non-match dates. The aggregate data shows a city-wide average of $523.59 on game days compared to the non-match day average of $398.36, representing a typical event-day premium of $125.23.
On average, hotel prices across all 16 host cities jump by 31.44% when a game is in town. However, as expected the intensity of this spike varies dramatically by region.
The most significant price differentials are found in Canada and Mexico. These regions are seeing the highest demand-driven premiums, suggesting that inventory is tighter or the perceived prestige of the match days is being more aggressively monetized by revenue managers.
When we look purely at the percentage increase, the disparity between a standard night and a match night becomes even more apparent:
Interestingly, several US cities, particularly in the South, show a remarkably small difference between game Day and non-game day averages.
Commentary from Lighthouse Commercial Strategist Daniel Foreman, with 10 years revenue management experience.
As you will know, the dramatic hotel price shifts observed for the FIFA World Cup 2026 are not merely products of organic demand.
They are the result of deliberate and sophisticated revenue management strategies that encompass pick-up and pace, demand prediction, dynamic pricing, and inventory control.
Here we take a look at some of the potential tactics being used by revenue managers in host cities.
Our analysis shows a concentrated pricing peak roughly 5.5 to 6 months out. So far, this appears to be the strategic sweet spot for hoteliers
In markets like Vancouver, New York and Boston, high initial rates act as a filter to ensure they don't fill rooms with low-yield leisure bookings (early-bird fans looking for deals) and standard corporate travelers (regular accounts using negotiated fixed rates) before high-value corporate and sponsorship segments enter the market for the event.
The explosive room price growth in Guadalajara (385%) and Monterrey (203.59%) between lead time 350 and 147 for the group stages likely indicates that the initial underpricing was corrected as the booking pace may have triggered automatic rate increases.
This is a classic catch-up strategy once the market's willingness to pay is validated by the draw.
The 10.56% average room price increase for knockout rounds confirms that revenue managers are currently prioritizing rate growth over pure occupancy for the group stages, assuming there will be plenty of demand to sell out.
By maintaining high price floors, revenue managers are banking on a tournament funnel effect. As the field narrows, the scarcity of rooms in the remaining host cities will eventually drive occupancy to near 100% – even at premium price points.
During a mega-event, the traditional business mix is inverted. Revenue managers must navigate a segment swap where standard corporate demand disappears and is replaced by high-yield, event-specific business.
It is a historical certainty that regular meetings and conferences will avoid host cities during event dates to escape high prices. Revenue managers are raising transient rates for fans to offset the loss of this reliable base demand.
Regular corporate travel is replaced by sponsorship, media, and FIFA-affiliated groups. These are the high-value segments that hoteliers are holding inventory for.
Displacement analysis will be used to decide whether to bank a ‘bird in the hand', such as a 50-room media block for 14 nights at $300, or hold out for individual transient fans willing to pay $500+ for a much shorter stay closer to kick off.
In more supply-constrained markets like Monterrey, the data suggests hoteliers are carefully balancing these blocks to ensure the highest Revenue Per Available Room (RevPAR) across the entire tournament window.
The minimal price volatility in some US markets, like Atlanta's 1.73% match-day premium and New York's relatively small 12.70% price increase for knockout rounds suggests that revenue managers there are likely using inventory fencing rather than just pure price hikes.
Instead of a massive price spike for a single night, many hotels will implement a 2-to-4-night length-of-stay (LOS) restriction. This protects the shoulder nights (the days before and after a match) from cratering in occupancy once the fans leave.
During high-compression windows, savvy hoteliers also often close off discounted channels (Expedia, Priceline, etc.) to drive traffic to their high-margin direct channel.
Vancouver consistently outranks even New York as the most expensive city in this tournament, but why you may be asking yourself?
Along with the world's biggest sporting event, there is a perfect strom of local dynamics at play in Vancouver which can be broken down into four distinct areas.
While Vancouver's population and tourism have exploded, the hotel bed stock has actually decreased over the last two decades.
Between 2002 and 2022, Vancouver saw a net loss of hotel rooms. Approximately 550 rooms were lost during the pandemic alone as the city and province purchased hotels (like the Days Inn and Howard Johnson) to convert them into supportive housing.
High land costs and best-use zoning laws historically favored residential condos over hotels because they offered quicker returns for developers.
Destination Vancouver reports the city needs 10,000 new rooms by 2050 just to keep up with demand. While 4,200 rooms are in the pipeline, very few are opening in time for the 2026 peak season.
Bill 35 (Short-Term Rental Accommodations Act), took full effect in May 2024. The crux of this bill focused on a principal residence requirement, in which most secondary suites and investment Airbnbs are now illegal in B.C.
This removed thousands of units from the market. A 2025 Deloitte report commissioned by Airbnb suggested that these restrictions contributed to hotel price spikes of up to 20% in the first year of enforcement as travelers were forced back into a limited hotel pool.
The summer in Vancouver brings warm, dry weather, attracting tourists for outdoor pursuits like hiking, kayaking, and whale watching. Combine this with Vancouver's high cost of living and you get relatively high hotel prices.
Vancouver's inventory is further constrained in summer by cruise ship arrivals. This is a massive demand multiplier and puts pressure on hotels in the city, with city wide occupancy sometimes hitting 95%.
In 2025, Vancouver saw approximately 1.2 million cruise passengers. Most of these passengers require a hotel for at least one night before or after their Alaska cruise.
When a ship with 4,000 passengers docks, it can effectively wipe out 15-20% of downtown's available hotel inventory in a single day.
In late 2024 and throughout 2025, workers at major hotels (Hyatt Regency, Westin Bayshore, Pinnacle) represented by UNITE HERE Local 40 secured wage increases of roughly 34% over the life of the contract.
Housekeepers in Vancouver now earn among the highest hospitality wages in Canada (heading toward $37–$40/hour by 2027/28).
These increased operating costs are almost immediately pushed to the consumer via room prices.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup will bring extraordinary demand to North America, but as the data clearly shows, every destination is different.
From the explosive price growth in Mexican markets like Monterrey and Guadalajara to the supply-constrained highs of Vancouver and the relative stability of coastal US cities, the impact on North American markets is far from uniform. Just because your market reacted to a certain way to an event in the past doesn't mean the same pattern will repeat this time around.
The extreme demand windows created by big events do not exist in a vacuum. They are in fact highly contextual, with the game schedule also dictated by local supply-demand dynamics.
A one-size-fits-all commercial strategy for events leaves money on the table. To keep you finger on the market pulse you need predictive intelligence.
Lighthouse provides the real-time data to act on market trends, confidently optimize room prices, and maximize revenue for the world's biggest sporting event, regardless of how market conditions evolve.
Get in touch to see how you can fully capitalize on a once in a generation revenue driver.
Lighthouse is the leading commercial platform for the travel & hospitality industry.
We transform complexity into confidence by providing actionable market insights, business intelligence, and pricing tools that maximize revenue growth.
We continually innovate to deliver the best platform for hospitality professionals to price more effectively, measure performance more efficiently, and understand the market in new ways.
Trusted by over 70,000 hotels in 185 countries, Lighthouse is the only solution that provides real-time hotel and short-term rental data in a single platform. We strive to deliver the best possible experience with unmatched customer service. We consider our clients as true partners—their success is our success.
For more information about Lighthouse, please visit: https://www.mylighthouse.com.
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Hospitality Net membership explained
The Emma Hayes era with the United States women's national team has been a good one so far, with 26 wins and just three losses in 31 games.
A terrific start saw Hayes win the first ever Ballon d'Or awarded for Women's Coach of the Year after leading the USWNT to an Olympic gold medal, defeating Brazil in a tense final.
It hasn't been speed bump free, but Hayes is exploring the program's depth and mostly producing wins.
MORE — USWNT records — most goals, caps, wins | Stream USWNT on Peacock
And there's so much more to learn about this program and it's top young talent. Sixteen-year-old Lily Yohannes scored on her debut in a friendly win against South Korea and 24-year-old Croix Bethune has now added a USWNT goal to her resume as one of the best playmakers in the National Women's Soccer League.
Longtime Chelsea boss Hayes was hired in November 2023 and now all eyes are on her to see if she can lead turn the four-time World Cup-winning USWNT into a five-star machine.
Here are the previous two years of the USWNT, plus what's next.
FriendliesUSWNT vs Paraguay — Jan. 24 — Won 6-0 — Video highlightsUSWNT vs Chile — Jan. 27 — Santa Barbara, California
SheBelieves CupUSWNT vs Argentina — March 1 — Nashville, TennesseeUSWNT vs Canada — March 4 — Columbus, OhioUSWNT vs Colombia — March 7 — Harrison, New Jersey
FriendliesUSWNT vs Japan — April 11 — San Jose, CaliforniaUSWNT vs Japan — April 14 — Seattle, WashingtonUSWNT vs Japan — April 17 — Commerce City, Colorado
SheBelieves CupUSWNT vs Colombia — Feb. 20 — Won 2-0 — Video highlightsUSWNT vs Australia — Feb. 23 — Won 2-1 — Video highlightsUSWNT vs Japan — Feb. 26 — Lost 2-1 — Video highlights
FriendliesUSWNT vs Brazil — April 5 — Won 2-0 — Video highlightsUSWNT vs Brazil — April 8 — Lost 2-1 — Video highlightsUSWNT vs China — May 31 — Won 3-0USWNT vs Jamaica — June 3 — Won 4-0USWNT vs Republic of Ireland — June 26 — Won 4-0 — Video highlightsUSWNT vs Republic of Ireland — June 29 — Won 4-0USWNT vs Canada — July 2 — Won 3-0USWNT vs Portugal — October 23 — Lost 2-1 — Video highlightsUSWNT vs Portugal — October 26 — Won 3-1 — Video highlightsUSWNT vs New Zealand — October 29 — Won 6-0 — Video highlightsUSWNT vs Italy — November 28 — Won 3-0USWNT vs Italy — December 1 — Won 2-0
*if necessary
W Gold Cupvs Dominican Republic — Feb. 20 — Won 5-0vs Argentina — Feb. 23 — Won 4-0vs Mexico — Feb. 26 — Lost 2-0vs Colombia — March 3 — Won 3-0vs Canada — March 6 — Drew 2-2, won 3-1 on pensvs Brazil — March 10 — Won 1-0 — Recap, highlights
SheBelieves Cupvs Japan — April 6 — Won 2-1vs Canada — April 9 — Drew 2-2, won 5-4 on pens
Friendliesvs South Korea — June 1 — Won 4-0 — Hayes wins debut — Recap, highlightsvs South Korea — June 4 — Won 3-0 — Highlightsvs Mexico — July 13 — Won 1-0vs Costa Rica — July 16 — Draw 0-0
Olympicsvs Zambia — July 25 — Won 3-0 — Recap, highlights & analysisvs Germany — July 28 — Won 4-1 — Recap, highlights & analysisvs Australia — July 31 — Won 2-1 — Recap, highlights & analysisQuarterfinal vs Japan — August 3 — Won 1-0 (aet) — Recap, highlights & analysisSemifinal vs Germany — August 6 — Won 1-0 (aet)— Recap, highlights & analysisGold medal match vs Brazil — Won 1-0 — Recap, highlights, & analysis
Friendliesvs Iceland — Oct. 24 — Won 3-1 — Video highlightsvs Iceland — Oct. 27 — Won 3-1 — Video highlightsvs Argentina — Oct. 30 — Won 3-0 — Video highlightsat England — Nov. 30 — Wembley Stadium, London — Drew 0-0 — Recap, highlightsvs Netherlands — Dec. 3 — Bingoal Stadium, The Hague — Won 2-0
Friendlyvs Wales — July 9 — Won 2-0
World Cupvs Vietnam — July 21 — Won 3-0vs Netherlands — July 26 — Drew 1-1vs Portugal — Aug. 1 — Drew 0-0vs Sweden — Aug. 6 — Drew 0-0, lost 5-4 on penalties
Friendliesvs South Africa — Sept. 21 — Won 3-0vs South Africa — Sept. 24 — Won 2-0vs Colombia — Oct. 26 — Drew 0-0vs Colombia — Oct. 29 — Won 3-0vs China — Dec. 2 — Won 3-0vs China — Dec. 5 — Won 2-1
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After a fortnight that began with 128 players and a wide-open draw, the Australian Open arrives at its quarterfinals with a familiar favorite, a first-time teenager and little margin left for error.
Coco Gauff was just 17 when she advanced to her first Grand Slam quarterfinal.
"Oh my God," she thought to herself. "I'm so close to winning."
She lost that 2021 Roland Garros match to Barbora Krejcikova in straight sets.
"Plenty of people make the quarterfinals in their career and didn't win," Gauff told reporters at Melbourne Park on Sunday. "That's just how I thought at that age. Now I just treat every match like I'm the furthest away from the trophy, even if I'm in the final."
This Australian Open fortnight began with 128 players, bursting with high hopes and aspirations. But after Monday's WTA Tour Driven by Mercedes-Benz action, we're down (under) to a truly elite eight.
Iva Jovic, 18, is the gatecrasher here. This is her first major quarterfinal, but she's not approaching this one with the wide-eyed wonder of the American teenager that came before her.
Asked if she felt like she was playing with house money, Jovic shook her head.
"I don't really feel like there is a lot of house money or [an] underdog mentality that I'm feeling," she said coolly. "Because I don't feel like I have been playing anything outside of my comfort zone or outside of my normal level.
"I have come from two other tournaments where I was playing every day and winning a lot of matches. So this week, and the level that I'm showing right now, doesn't really feel much different than that."
As we enter quarterfinal play, the top five seeds are all still in contention in Melbourne, including four Americans and a two-time champion.
We take a closer look at these sterling matchups, with thoughts from writers Greg Garber and Brad Kallet.
Head-to-head: 0-0
What's at stake: Sabalenka -- who has played three tiebreaks in her past four sets -- is trying to get to her fourth consecutive final in Melbourne. Jovic has won more matches this year (11) than any woman. Both players are making Martina Hingis kinds of history: Sabalenka has reached eight consecutive major quarterfinals on hard courts, the first player to do that since Hingis made 13 straight between 1996-2002. And Jovic dropped an opening bagel on Yulia Putintseva in the fourth round, the youngest to do that in a major since … Hingis, in 1998.
Garber's take: When we discussed some emerging storylines a month ago, one of the topics was which American outside the Top 10 has the most potential. I went with Jovic, Brad, so hey, at least I got something right. She's been terrific, but I can't see her beating Sabalenka in this spot.
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Kallet's take: It's incredible that Jovic is the last teenager standing, considering how well Mirra Andreeva and Victoria Mboko have been playing. The 18-year-old American has looked phenomenal all week, picking up a signature win over Jasmine Paolini, but she's yet to face a player with the power and pace of Sabalenka. The World No. 1 has been challenged in some sets of late, but she's yet to drop one all week. In fact, she hasn't dropped a set all season. I agree that Sabalenka gets it done.
Head-to-head: Gauff leads 2-1
What's at stake: It's another generational collision with nearly a decade between these two. At 21, Gauff is playing in her third straight quarterfinal at the Australian Open, the youngest to pull that off since Maria Sharapova from 2005-08. Svitolina, 31, is in her 14th Grand Slam quarterfinal but has progressed to the semifinals only three times.
Garber's take: Gauff suffered some lapses in her past two matches, going the distance with Hailey Baptiste and Karolina Muchova. Svitolina blistered Andreeva with a forceful 6-2, 6-4 win. Nevertheless, I see Gauff digging in and winning this one. She's increasingly dangerous when she's closing in on the finish line.
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Kallet's take: Yep, Gauff has had a tricky last couple matches, and it's a great sign that she's held her nerve (and her serve) to return to the quarters yet again. But Svitolina has quietly had a brilliant start to the season, winning the title in Auckland -- and beating Jovic in the process -- before winning all eight of her sets in Melbourne. The 6-2, 6-4 win over Andreeva, who had been red hot, was a statement. I'm picking the veteran to take this one in a tight three-setter.
Head-to-head: Pegula leads 3-0
What's at stake: Pegula is into her fourth Australian Open quarterfinal after dethroning her best pal, Madison Keys, in the fourth round. She hasn't been to this stage in Melbourne since 2023, and another win will net her best result ever at the Slam. She'll have to get past another American to get there -- and another tremendous power player. Anisimova is seeking her third straight major final.
Garber's take: At the age of 31 (she turns 32 next month), Pegula continues to produce some of her best tennis. She looked rock solid in her 6-3, 6-4 win over Keys. Pegula has now won 13 of her past 14 matches against fellow Americans -- and has never lost to Anisimova (3-0). That said, I like the way Anisimova is tracking, building on last year's breakthrough success. Anisimova in three.
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Kallet's take: You're right, Greg -- Pegula looked great against Keys, and hasn't really been challenged all tournament. The wins have looked routine. Save for a tiebreaker in her last match, Anisimova has looked similarly in control. I don't put a ton of stock into their head-to-head -- their most recent match was a year and a half ago, and Anisimova is a different player now. I agree that Pegula -- so consistent and so gritty -- pushes it to three, but Anisimova prevails.
Head-to-head: Swiatek leads 6-5
What's at stake: Swiatek is seeking her second straight (and third overall) semifinal in Melbourne, in her somewhat quiet quest for the career Grand Slam. It's incredible that she's only three matches away from accomplishing that feat. Rybakina, who hasn't dropped a set through four matches in Melbourne, is back in the quarterfinals for the first time since making the final here back in 2023.
Garber's take: There have been a couple of bobbles for Swiatek along the way -- a tough opening tiebreak against qualifier Yuan Yue and a 6-1 dropped set to Anna Kalinskaya. Rybakina has yet to drop a set. The 6-5 head-to-head doesn't reveal much, but … Rybakina won their last meeting, at the WTA Finals in Riyadh. And in their only previous match in Melbourne, in 2023, Rybakina was a 6-4, 6-4 winner.
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Kallet's take: That WTA Finals match you're referencing, Greg, was quite memorable for how quickly it turned. Swiatek won the first set fairly handily, and then Rybakina came right back to win 12 of the next 13 games. Prior to that match, Swiatek had beaten the former Wimbledon champ four straight times in 2025. This feels like a pick'em between two veterans and champions, but I'm going with Swiatek to narrowly escape in three.
Rod Laver Arena
11:30 a.m. local; 7:30 p.m. ET (Monday)-- Aryna Sabalenka [1] vs Iva Jovic (USA) [29]Not before 1:30 p.m. local; 9:30 p.m. ET (Monday)-- Alexander Zverev (GER) [3] vs Learner Tien (USA) [25]
7 p.m. local; 3 a.m. ET (Tuesday)-- Coco Gauff (USA) [3] vs Elina Svitolina (UKR) [12]-- Carlos Alcaraz (ESP) [1] vs Alex de Minaur (AUS) [6]
Margaret Court Arena
11 a.m. local; 7 p.m. ET (Monday)-- Taylor Townsend (USA) / Nikola Mektic (CRO) [4] vs Irina Khromacheva / Christian Harrison (USA)-- Hailey Baptiste (USA) / Peyton Stearns (USA) vs Elise Mertens (BEL) / Shuai Zhang (CHN) [4]
Not before 1:30 p.m. local; 9:30 p.m. ET (Monday)-- Anna Danilina (KAZ) / JJ Tracy (USA) vs Luisa Stefani (BRA) / Marcelo Arevalo (ESA) [2]-- Olivia Gadecki (AUS) / John Peers (AUS) vs Maya Joint (AUS) / Matthew Romios (AUS)or-- Aleksandra Krunic (SRB) / Mate Pavic (CRO) [5]
Not before 3:30 p.m. local; 11:30 p.m. ET (Monday)-- Jason Kubler (AUS) / Marc Polmans (AUS) vs Sadio Doumbia (FRA) / Fabien Reboul (FRA) [12]-- Katerina Siniakova (CZE) / Sem Verbeek (NED) vs Kristina Mladenovic (FRA) / Manuel Guinard (FRA)or-- Demi Schuurs (NED) / Julian Cash (GBR) [3]
KIA Arena
10:30 a.m. local; 6:30 p.m. ET (Monday)-- Casey Dellacqua (AUS) / Samantha Stosur (AUS) vs Daniela Hantuchova (SVK) / Angelique Kerber (GER)-- Mark Philippoussis (AUS) / Patrick Rafter (AUS) vs Tommy Haas (GER) / Marat Safin
After a fortnight that began with 128 players and a wide-open draw, the Australian Open arrives at its quarterfinals with a familiar favorite, a first-time teenager and little margin left for error.
"We'll be working together on the mental side of performance and professional development," the 45-year-old shared.ByTENNIS.comPublished Jan 26, 2026 copy_link
Published Jan 26, 2026
© Instagram @juankiferri
When his incredibly successful collaboration with Carlos Alcaraz came to an end this past December, Juan Carlos Ferrero's inbox was surely flooded with interest in his services.Over their seven-plus years together, Ferrero was the guiding voice that helped Alcaraz reach the top of the ATP rankings and win a pair of titles each at Wimbledon, Roland Garros and the US Open among numerous successes. As Ferrero's former protégé now chases a Career Grand Slam at the Australian Open without him (Alcaraz is through to the quarterfinals), the highly-respected coach has found his next project.And it's not on the tennis court.👉 The Big T Podcast, Episode 1: Inside the Alcaraz/Ferrero split
Over their seven-plus years together, Ferrero was the guiding voice that helped Alcaraz reach the top of the ATP rankings and win a pair of titles each at Wimbledon, Roland Garros and the US Open among numerous successes. As Ferrero's former protégé now chases a Career Grand Slam at the Australian Open without him (Alcaraz is through to the quarterfinals), the highly-respected coach has found his next project.And it's not on the tennis court.👉 The Big T Podcast, Episode 1: Inside the Alcaraz/Ferrero split
And it's not on the tennis court.👉 The Big T Podcast, Episode 1: Inside the Alcaraz/Ferrero split
👉 The Big T Podcast, Episode 1: Inside the Alcaraz/Ferrero split
The former world No. 1 revealed Sunday that he's trading in racquets for clubs, joining Angel Ayora's team.“We'll be working together on the mental side of performance and professional development,” Ferrero wrote on his social media.“We've already started, highly motivated and looking forward to continuing this journey.”The 45-year-old will still be involved with the training center that bears his name in Villena. The Ferrero Tennis Academy, founded in 1990 by Antonio Martínez Cascales and later rebranded to honor the future Roland Garros champion he would coach, also features the "Rural Ferrero Hotel" and several padel courts among its facilities.
“We'll be working together on the mental side of performance and professional development,” Ferrero wrote on his social media.“We've already started, highly motivated and looking forward to continuing this journey.”The 45-year-old will still be involved with the training center that bears his name in Villena. The Ferrero Tennis Academy, founded in 1990 by Antonio Martínez Cascales and later rebranded to honor the future Roland Garros champion he would coach, also features the "Rural Ferrero Hotel" and several padel courts among its facilities.
“We've already started, highly motivated and looking forward to continuing this journey.”The 45-year-old will still be involved with the training center that bears his name in Villena. The Ferrero Tennis Academy, founded in 1990 by Antonio Martínez Cascales and later rebranded to honor the future Roland Garros champion he would coach, also features the "Rural Ferrero Hotel" and several padel courts among its facilities.
The 45-year-old will still be involved with the training center that bears his name in Villena. The Ferrero Tennis Academy, founded in 1990 by Antonio Martínez Cascales and later rebranded to honor the future Roland Garros champion he would coach, also features the "Rural Ferrero Hotel" and several padel courts among its facilities.
Ferrero has no intent of leaving that legacy behind.“Tennis is my life, and I'll continue giving my all at the Academy and on the circuit. However, golf also excites me—it's an individual sport where the mental aspect plays a crucial role,” he explained.“I'm delighted to be able to contribute my experience and support Angel's growth on the circuit.”Ayora, 21, currently competes on the DP World Tour (European PGA Tour) and holds an Official World Golf Ranking (OWGR) of No. 115.
“Tennis is my life, and I'll continue giving my all at the Academy and on the circuit. However, golf also excites me—it's an individual sport where the mental aspect plays a crucial role,” he explained.“I'm delighted to be able to contribute my experience and support Angel's growth on the circuit.”Ayora, 21, currently competes on the DP World Tour (European PGA Tour) and holds an Official World Golf Ranking (OWGR) of No. 115.
“I'm delighted to be able to contribute my experience and support Angel's growth on the circuit.”Ayora, 21, currently competes on the DP World Tour (European PGA Tour) and holds an Official World Golf Ranking (OWGR) of No. 115.
Ayora, 21, currently competes on the DP World Tour (European PGA Tour) and holds an Official World Golf Ranking (OWGR) of No. 115.
Ben Shelton showcased the growing versatility of his game on Monday at the Australian Open, where he rallied past Casper Ruud to book a return to the quarter-finals in Melbourne.
The 23-year-old American combined resilient defence with bursts of explosive aggression to seal a gripping 3-6, 6-4, 6-3, 6-4 victory after two hours, 36 minutes inside Rod Laver Arena. It marks Shelton's third quarter-final appearance in just four trips to Melbourne Park, where he advanced to a meeting with two-time defending champion Jannik Sinner.
“For me, the atmosphere is everything,” said Shelton. “I'm definitely a competitor. I'm rowdy on the court and I look forward to rowdy crowds. Down here in Australia, there's no shortage… From my first experience, I fell in love with this tournament. It's one of my favourites marked down on the calendar every year.”
Quarter-Finals Bound! 👏@BenShelton takes out Ruud to advance into a 5th career Grand Slam quarter-final 💪#AO26 pic.twitter.com/Qp1kC6H4y3
Ruud had set the tone early with a dominant serving display in the opening set, but the Norwegian will rue costly lapses on serve late in both the second and third sets, moments that allowed Shelton to wrestle control of the contest.
Once in front, the eighth seed raised his level, striking a series of eye-catching winners and finishing points at the net with authority. Shelton won 97 per cent (29/30) of net points during the clash, according to Infosys Stats, and dropped just three points on serve in the fourth set as he closed out the match in commanding fashion.
“It's what you look forward to most in this sport,” Shelton said of his upcoming clash with Sinner, who leads their Lexus ATP Head2Head series 8-1, including victory in their semi-final meeting in Melbourne last year. “It's where I wanted to be. I wanted to be back here. I wanted to give myself another shot, improve on some things I didn't do as well last year and leave it all out on the court.”
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Ruud, who reached the fourth round at the Australian Open for the first time since 2021, will now head home to Norway, where he and his wife Maria are expecting a daughter.
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Jessica Pegula knocked out defending champion Madison Keys in an all-American fourth round at the Australian Open and will face fellow American Amanda Anisimova for a semifinal spot.
Jessica Pegula brought Madison Keys' title defense to a close Monday at the Australian Open, earning a 6-3, 6-4 win that sets up another all-American Top 10 meeting on the WTA Tour Driven by Mercedes-Benz against Amanda Anisimova in the quarterfinals.
Australian Open: Scores | Draws | Order of play
Something had to give in the fourth head-to-head meeting between the two Billie Jean King Cup teammates, close friends and The Player's Box podcast co-hosts. Keys, who won her first Grand Slam singles title in Melbourne last year, brought a 10-match winning streak into the contest after three victories this year, while Pegula entered the match 3-0 in Round of 16 appearances at the tournament.
In 1 hour, 18 minutes, the No. 6 seed advanced, improving to 8-2 in Grand Slam fourth-round matches. The 2024 US Open finalist broke Keys' serve four times and neutralized the No. 9 seed's primary weapons, returning more than 70% of her opponent's serves and committing just 13 unforced errors against 14 winners. Keys finished with 28 unforced errors, as Pegula surged to a 6-3, 4-1 lead she never relinquished.
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"I've been playing really well, seeing the ball really well, hitting the ball really well this whole tournament, and I wanted to stay true to that and lean on a couple of things that I felt like she would do," Pegula said afterwards in her on-court interview.
"I felt like I came out doing it pretty well and got a couple of quick points for her early on. When I had that lead, I tried to stick with that lead as much as I could ... and tried to focus on what I needed to do and the patterns to look out for."
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The win continued Pegula's strong track record at the Australian Open -- and against fellow Americans. Since a loss to Keys in the Round of 16 at the 2023 US Open, Pegula is 28-3 against her compatriots, including a 13-1 mark over the past 52 weeks.
That run will be tested again in the quarterfinals, where Pegula faces No. 4 seed Anisimova. She defeated China's Wang Xinyu 7-6(4), 6-4 later Monday to reach the last eight, advancing to the quarterfinals or better at all four Grand Slams in her career. She enters the matchup 0-3 against Pegula.
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Wang had earlier upset No. 24 seed Jelena Ostapenko and No. 13 seed Linda Noskova, but was unable to add a third seeded win against Anisimova. The first 12 games of the match went with serve before the two-time major finalist took control in the tiebreak, winning four of the final five points, including three winners.
Anisimova was broken only once in the 1-hour, 42-minute victory, coming in her opening service game of the second set after she had converted her fourth break point of the match. She broke again to move ahead 2-1 and was never threatened again, dropping just two points across her final four service games.
"I think the fact that I've been in the Round of 16 three time, and making that step further is pretty special," Anisimova said. "And yeah, I love playing in Australia. So just being here an extra day, an extra match, is exciting.
"I've been honestly enjoying every second out there. I feel like I'm handling, like, the pressure and expectation that I'm trying to not really think about, but I think that just means a lot more to me that I've been able to really handle that well this week."
Jessica Pegula knocked out defending champion Madison Keys in an all-American fourth round at the Australian Open and will face fellow American Amanda Anisimova for a semifinal spot.
The two-time defending champion struggled in the heat in his third round but showed no ill effects to defeat countryman Luciano Darderi in straight sets.ByDavid KanePublished Jan 26, 2026 copy_link
Published Jan 26, 2026
MELBOURNE, Australia—Jannik Sinner showed no ill effects from a physically challenging third round at the 2026 Australian Open, rebounding to post a 6-1, 6-3, 7-6 (2) win over Luciano Darderi to reach a third straight quarterfinal in Melbourne.Sinner struggled with cramps through four sets against unseeded American Eliot Spizzirri but eased past his 22nd-seeded countryman to win an 18th straight Australian Open match in two hours and nine minutes on Margaret Court Arena on Monday.“Yesterday was a very, very easy day for me,” Sinner said of his recovery from the Spizzirri match. “Just played for nearly half an hour. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a bit different when there is no sun, even if it's quite warm outside still.“But yeah, it's also different opponent. Everything is different in every day. So, I felt quite good out there physically. Everything was okay today. Let's see what's coming in the next round.”The No. 2 seed captured his day off for his official YouTube channel, taking fans through a day at the practice courts followed by an evening out to dinner in anticipation of his evening match on MCA.
Sinner struggled with cramps through four sets against unseeded American Eliot Spizzirri but eased past his 22nd-seeded countryman to win an 18th straight Australian Open match in two hours and nine minutes on Margaret Court Arena on Monday.“Yesterday was a very, very easy day for me,” Sinner said of his recovery from the Spizzirri match. “Just played for nearly half an hour. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a bit different when there is no sun, even if it's quite warm outside still.“But yeah, it's also different opponent. Everything is different in every day. So, I felt quite good out there physically. Everything was okay today. Let's see what's coming in the next round.”The No. 2 seed captured his day off for his official YouTube channel, taking fans through a day at the practice courts followed by an evening out to dinner in anticipation of his evening match on MCA.
“Yesterday was a very, very easy day for me,” Sinner said of his recovery from the Spizzirri match. “Just played for nearly half an hour. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a bit different when there is no sun, even if it's quite warm outside still.“But yeah, it's also different opponent. Everything is different in every day. So, I felt quite good out there physically. Everything was okay today. Let's see what's coming in the next round.”The No. 2 seed captured his day off for his official YouTube channel, taking fans through a day at the practice courts followed by an evening out to dinner in anticipation of his evening match on MCA.
“But yeah, it's also different opponent. Everything is different in every day. So, I felt quite good out there physically. Everything was okay today. Let's see what's coming in the next round.”The No. 2 seed captured his day off for his official YouTube channel, taking fans through a day at the practice courts followed by an evening out to dinner in anticipation of his evening match on MCA.
The No. 2 seed captured his day off for his official YouTube channel, taking fans through a day at the practice courts followed by an evening out to dinner in anticipation of his evening match on MCA.
“For me, every court here is very nice,” Sinner said of playing in Melbourne Park's second biggest show court. “I'm very happy also to go on Margaret Court. I felt like the third set was a bit different because it also got a bit later. The court slows down a bit. From 7:30 on it's a bit different. But this I feel like it's in every court. I don't know how the outside courts are, for example, without the stadiums around.“But all things considered, it's more or less the same. Of course, it might feel a bit faster because the court itself is a bit smaller than Rod Laver. The same thing in Roland Garros if you play in Chatrier or in Lenglen. I feel like it also depends how much space you have around to move. But I didn't feel so much difference, to be honest.”Playing Darderi for the first time in an official match, he struck a clean 46 winners to just 16 unforced errors and broke serve four times while saving all six break points against his own serve over three sets. Though Darderi made a strong push in the third set, Sinner ultimately proved too strong.
“But all things considered, it's more or less the same. Of course, it might feel a bit faster because the court itself is a bit smaller than Rod Laver. The same thing in Roland Garros if you play in Chatrier or in Lenglen. I feel like it also depends how much space you have around to move. But I didn't feel so much difference, to be honest.”Playing Darderi for the first time in an official match, he struck a clean 46 winners to just 16 unforced errors and broke serve four times while saving all six break points against his own serve over three sets. Though Darderi made a strong push in the third set, Sinner ultimately proved too strong.
Playing Darderi for the first time in an official match, he struck a clean 46 winners to just 16 unforced errors and broke serve four times while saving all six break points against his own serve over three sets. Though Darderi made a strong push in the third set, Sinner ultimately proved too strong.
“Of course, we try to prepare the match in one way,” Sinner said. “Things got very different from the third set on, for example. He was serving much better. I couldn't return as much as in the first couple of sets.“Yeah, I mean, of course you try to understand where he is going to play. Of course, there is a certain percentage. If you play cross-court or you play down the line, you know a little bit. In the same time, if I would lose the first couple of sets, I also would change like he did today. It gets a bit more unpredictable.”Sinner will next face the winner of the final fourth-round match between No. 8 seed Ben Shelton and No. 12 seed Casper Ruud. If Shelton advances, seven of the Top 8 seeds will have made the quarterfinals in the men's draw.
“Yeah, I mean, of course you try to understand where he is going to play. Of course, there is a certain percentage. If you play cross-court or you play down the line, you know a little bit. In the same time, if I would lose the first couple of sets, I also would change like he did today. It gets a bit more unpredictable.”Sinner will next face the winner of the final fourth-round match between No. 8 seed Ben Shelton and No. 12 seed Casper Ruud. If Shelton advances, seven of the Top 8 seeds will have made the quarterfinals in the men's draw.
Sinner will next face the winner of the final fourth-round match between No. 8 seed Ben Shelton and No. 12 seed Casper Ruud. If Shelton advances, seven of the Top 8 seeds will have made the quarterfinals in the men's draw.
“The fact that people assume they know my stance on certain important topics is just wrong,” the American said after reaching the quarterfinals in Melbourne.ByDavid KanePublished Jan 26, 2026 copy_link
Published Jan 26, 2026
MELBOURNE, Australia—Amanda Anisimova spoke out about multiple online controversies that dogged her through the first week of the 2026 Australian Open after reaching the quarterfinals on Monday.“I feel like the Internet, it's tough. It comes with the job, which is something I've learned to get used to,” Anisimova said after defeating Wang Xinyu to make it into the last eight for the first time in Melbourne.“There are definitely days where it bothers me a little bit, and I tell myself it's okay to get upset or frustrated, because at the end of the day, I'm human. But yeah, I mean, it can be pretty difficult. It's not worth so much of my energy and time. That's something that I've learned to get used to.”The No. 4 seed was at the center of two such dust-ups as her Australian Open campaign got underway, first after she declined to answer a question about U.S. politics, and later when a deceptive video surfaced accusing her of hitting a ball kid with a ball during a match.
“I feel like the Internet, it's tough. It comes with the job, which is something I've learned to get used to,” Anisimova said after defeating Wang Xinyu to make it into the last eight for the first time in Melbourne.“There are definitely days where it bothers me a little bit, and I tell myself it's okay to get upset or frustrated, because at the end of the day, I'm human. But yeah, I mean, it can be pretty difficult. It's not worth so much of my energy and time. That's something that I've learned to get used to.”The No. 4 seed was at the center of two such dust-ups as her Australian Open campaign got underway, first after she declined to answer a question about U.S. politics, and later when a deceptive video surfaced accusing her of hitting a ball kid with a ball during a match.
“There are definitely days where it bothers me a little bit, and I tell myself it's okay to get upset or frustrated, because at the end of the day, I'm human. But yeah, I mean, it can be pretty difficult. It's not worth so much of my energy and time. That's something that I've learned to get used to.”The No. 4 seed was at the center of two such dust-ups as her Australian Open campaign got underway, first after she declined to answer a question about U.S. politics, and later when a deceptive video surfaced accusing her of hitting a ball kid with a ball during a match.
The No. 4 seed was at the center of two such dust-ups as her Australian Open campaign got underway, first after she declined to answer a question about U.S. politics, and later when a deceptive video surfaced accusing her of hitting a ball kid with a ball during a match.
“In my other press conference…I didn't want to answer a question that was obviously intended for just, like, a headline and clickbait,” Anisimova said. “That was my right. It had nothing to do with my political views or anything like that.”Anisimova was one of several American players asked about U.S. politics and current events in the first week of the tournament; her response drew numerous comments on social media that attempted to infer her political leanings.“The fact that people assume they know my stance on certain important topics is just wrong, and it's not factual,” she somewhat obliquely clarified.Ansimova later posted and deleted a tweet in response to a circulating video, which attempted to equate an innocuous on-court moment with Novak Djokovic's near-miss of a ball kid during his third-round match against Botic van de Zandschulp
Anisimova was one of several American players asked about U.S. politics and current events in the first week of the tournament; her response drew numerous comments on social media that attempted to infer her political leanings.“The fact that people assume they know my stance on certain important topics is just wrong, and it's not factual,” she somewhat obliquely clarified.Ansimova later posted and deleted a tweet in response to a circulating video, which attempted to equate an innocuous on-court moment with Novak Djokovic's near-miss of a ball kid during his third-round match against Botic van de Zandschulp
“The fact that people assume they know my stance on certain important topics is just wrong, and it's not factual,” she somewhat obliquely clarified.Ansimova later posted and deleted a tweet in response to a circulating video, which attempted to equate an innocuous on-court moment with Novak Djokovic's near-miss of a ball kid during his third-round match against Botic van de Zandschulp
Ansimova later posted and deleted a tweet in response to a circulating video, which attempted to equate an innocuous on-court moment with Novak Djokovic's near-miss of a ball kid during his third-round match against Botic van de Zandschulp
“I didn't even hit the ballkid,” confirmed Anisimova, who would have been defaulted from the tournament if she had. “You couldn't even see it in the clip.“People are always saying something. Yeah, people just love talking about stuff that's not even about the tennis.”On the court, Anisimova has left little to question when it comes to her form, which she has impressively carried over from a breakthrough 2025 season. Yet to drop a set Down Under, the 24-year-old has now reached the quarterfinals or better of all four major tournaments, having reached the finals of the last two at Wimbledon and the US Open. Her win over Wang guaranteed at least one American woman will reach the semifinals by drawing No. 6 seed Jessica Pegula.“We've always had some great matches,” Anisimova said of Pegula, who leads their tour-level head-to-head 3-0. “It's funny enough, I played her twice in the exhibitions in the pre-season. But yeah, I mean, she's such a great player. I really like her game. I'm sure it's going to be a tough battle again. We always, you know, really go for our shots when we play against each other. I feel like we always have really long rallies.“I feel like I always have a chance against anyone,” she added. “In my head, I feel like every match is new and different. Yeah, I think the fact that I've never beaten her before is an extra challenge for me.”
“People are always saying something. Yeah, people just love talking about stuff that's not even about the tennis.”On the court, Anisimova has left little to question when it comes to her form, which she has impressively carried over from a breakthrough 2025 season. Yet to drop a set Down Under, the 24-year-old has now reached the quarterfinals or better of all four major tournaments, having reached the finals of the last two at Wimbledon and the US Open. Her win over Wang guaranteed at least one American woman will reach the semifinals by drawing No. 6 seed Jessica Pegula.“We've always had some great matches,” Anisimova said of Pegula, who leads their tour-level head-to-head 3-0. “It's funny enough, I played her twice in the exhibitions in the pre-season. But yeah, I mean, she's such a great player. I really like her game. I'm sure it's going to be a tough battle again. We always, you know, really go for our shots when we play against each other. I feel like we always have really long rallies.“I feel like I always have a chance against anyone,” she added. “In my head, I feel like every match is new and different. Yeah, I think the fact that I've never beaten her before is an extra challenge for me.”
On the court, Anisimova has left little to question when it comes to her form, which she has impressively carried over from a breakthrough 2025 season. Yet to drop a set Down Under, the 24-year-old has now reached the quarterfinals or better of all four major tournaments, having reached the finals of the last two at Wimbledon and the US Open. Her win over Wang guaranteed at least one American woman will reach the semifinals by drawing No. 6 seed Jessica Pegula.“We've always had some great matches,” Anisimova said of Pegula, who leads their tour-level head-to-head 3-0. “It's funny enough, I played her twice in the exhibitions in the pre-season. But yeah, I mean, she's such a great player. I really like her game. I'm sure it's going to be a tough battle again. We always, you know, really go for our shots when we play against each other. I feel like we always have really long rallies.“I feel like I always have a chance against anyone,” she added. “In my head, I feel like every match is new and different. Yeah, I think the fact that I've never beaten her before is an extra challenge for me.”
“We've always had some great matches,” Anisimova said of Pegula, who leads their tour-level head-to-head 3-0. “It's funny enough, I played her twice in the exhibitions in the pre-season. But yeah, I mean, she's such a great player. I really like her game. I'm sure it's going to be a tough battle again. We always, you know, really go for our shots when we play against each other. I feel like we always have really long rallies.“I feel like I always have a chance against anyone,” she added. “In my head, I feel like every match is new and different. Yeah, I think the fact that I've never beaten her before is an extra challenge for me.”
“I feel like I always have a chance against anyone,” she added. “In my head, I feel like every match is new and different. Yeah, I think the fact that I've never beaten her before is an extra challenge for me.”
Two world No. 1s were asked to ditch their WHOOP fitness trackers before taking the court in Melbourne.ByStephanie LivaudaisPublished Jan 26, 2026 copy_link
Published Jan 26, 2026
World No. 1 Carlos Alcaraz and No. 19 seed Tommy Paul were set to face off on Rod Laver Arena on Sunday for a place in the quarterfinals, when the chair umpire spotted a banned item hidden under a sweatband on Alcaraz's wrist.The item in question was a fitness tracker called a WHOOP band—a now-familiar sight on the wrists of top players at this year's Australian Open.Read More: Carlos Alcaraz “suffocates” Tommy Paul, sends American out of Australian OpenLaunched in 2015, WHOOP's low-profile fitness tracker is waterproof and designed to be worn 24/7, making it a must-have for professional athletes and their teams, who use it to track everything from heart rate variability to sleep stages, skin temperature, blood oxygenation, and even detect illness.It's been worn by top-flight athletes like Cristiano Ronaldo, LeBron James and Rory McIlroy—and it's the same device that fellow world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka was also asked to remove before her own Australian Open first-round match.
The item in question was a fitness tracker called a WHOOP band—a now-familiar sight on the wrists of top players at this year's Australian Open.Read More: Carlos Alcaraz “suffocates” Tommy Paul, sends American out of Australian OpenLaunched in 2015, WHOOP's low-profile fitness tracker is waterproof and designed to be worn 24/7, making it a must-have for professional athletes and their teams, who use it to track everything from heart rate variability to sleep stages, skin temperature, blood oxygenation, and even detect illness.It's been worn by top-flight athletes like Cristiano Ronaldo, LeBron James and Rory McIlroy—and it's the same device that fellow world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka was also asked to remove before her own Australian Open first-round match.
Read More: Carlos Alcaraz “suffocates” Tommy Paul, sends American out of Australian OpenLaunched in 2015, WHOOP's low-profile fitness tracker is waterproof and designed to be worn 24/7, making it a must-have for professional athletes and their teams, who use it to track everything from heart rate variability to sleep stages, skin temperature, blood oxygenation, and even detect illness.It's been worn by top-flight athletes like Cristiano Ronaldo, LeBron James and Rory McIlroy—and it's the same device that fellow world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka was also asked to remove before her own Australian Open first-round match.
Launched in 2015, WHOOP's low-profile fitness tracker is waterproof and designed to be worn 24/7, making it a must-have for professional athletes and their teams, who use it to track everything from heart rate variability to sleep stages, skin temperature, blood oxygenation, and even detect illness.It's been worn by top-flight athletes like Cristiano Ronaldo, LeBron James and Rory McIlroy—and it's the same device that fellow world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka was also asked to remove before her own Australian Open first-round match.
It's been worn by top-flight athletes like Cristiano Ronaldo, LeBron James and Rory McIlroy—and it's the same device that fellow world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka was also asked to remove before her own Australian Open first-round match.
Alcaraz was asked to remove his WHOOP band before his fourth-round match against Tommy Paul.© Getty Images
© Getty Images
Read More: WHOOP and WTA Tour agree to multi-year partnershipAdding to the confusion: All WHOOP devices (3.0, 4.0, 5.0 & MG) have been approved for in-match use by the International Tennis Federation (ITF), and have been an approved staple at WTA and ATP tournaments for years, often worn discreetly under a sweatband.So what's the big deal with this tiny, screen-less fitness tracker?While the trackers are approved under ITF rules—as long as the player can show the device's haptic feedback is turned off, or that it's a model without haptic feedback—the Australian Open requires additional tournament-level approval before it can be worn during a live match.
Adding to the confusion: All WHOOP devices (3.0, 4.0, 5.0 & MG) have been approved for in-match use by the International Tennis Federation (ITF), and have been an approved staple at WTA and ATP tournaments for years, often worn discreetly under a sweatband.So what's the big deal with this tiny, screen-less fitness tracker?While the trackers are approved under ITF rules—as long as the player can show the device's haptic feedback is turned off, or that it's a model without haptic feedback—the Australian Open requires additional tournament-level approval before it can be worn during a live match.
So what's the big deal with this tiny, screen-less fitness tracker?While the trackers are approved under ITF rules—as long as the player can show the device's haptic feedback is turned off, or that it's a model without haptic feedback—the Australian Open requires additional tournament-level approval before it can be worn during a live match.
While the trackers are approved under ITF rules—as long as the player can show the device's haptic feedback is turned off, or that it's a model without haptic feedback—the Australian Open requires additional tournament-level approval before it can be worn during a live match.
Ridiculous. Whoop is approved by the International Tennis Federation for in-match wear and poses no safety risk. Let the athletes measure their bodies. Data is not steroids! https://t.co/fC3JX6Vldm
Read More: Sloane Stephens reveals the data and insights that take her game to the next levelWHOOP founder Will Ahmed called the situation “ridiculous” in a message on social media:“Ridiculous. Whoop is approved by the International Tennis Federation for in-match wear and poses no safety risk,” Ahmed wrote on X. “Let the athletes measure their bodies. Data is not steroids.”According to Tennis.com's gear expert Jon Levey, WHOOP devices are “designed to monitor physiological markers throughout the day and their impact on the body's readiness to perform… whether it be a tough three-setter or a tense day at the office."
WHOOP founder Will Ahmed called the situation “ridiculous” in a message on social media:“Ridiculous. Whoop is approved by the International Tennis Federation for in-match wear and poses no safety risk,” Ahmed wrote on X. “Let the athletes measure their bodies. Data is not steroids.”According to Tennis.com's gear expert Jon Levey, WHOOP devices are “designed to monitor physiological markers throughout the day and their impact on the body's readiness to perform… whether it be a tough three-setter or a tense day at the office."
“Ridiculous. Whoop is approved by the International Tennis Federation for in-match wear and poses no safety risk,” Ahmed wrote on X. “Let the athletes measure their bodies. Data is not steroids.”According to Tennis.com's gear expert Jon Levey, WHOOP devices are “designed to monitor physiological markers throughout the day and their impact on the body's readiness to perform… whether it be a tough three-setter or a tense day at the office."
According to Tennis.com's gear expert Jon Levey, WHOOP devices are “designed to monitor physiological markers throughout the day and their impact on the body's readiness to perform… whether it be a tough three-setter or a tense day at the office."
WTA and WHOOP signed a multi-year partnership in 2021, making it the first fitness tracker approved for in-match use.© Getty Images
© Getty Images
The devices have been a fixture at the top of professional tennis since the WTA and WHOOP signed a multi-year partnership in 2021, making it the first fitness tracker approved for in-match use in tennis.The ATP approved WHOOP and other wearables in 2024, saying the initiative would enhance player performance, recovery and injury prevention. Since then, the devices have frequently been seen on players, coaches and staff alike, both on and off the court.It's no surprise the straps have been spotted all over the courts in Melbourne, as soaring temperatures during the first week have left players and teams more focused than ever on balancing physical stress with proper recovery.
The ATP approved WHOOP and other wearables in 2024, saying the initiative would enhance player performance, recovery and injury prevention. Since then, the devices have frequently been seen on players, coaches and staff alike, both on and off the court.It's no surprise the straps have been spotted all over the courts in Melbourne, as soaring temperatures during the first week have left players and teams more focused than ever on balancing physical stress with proper recovery.
It's no surprise the straps have been spotted all over the courts in Melbourne, as soaring temperatures during the first week have left players and teams more focused than ever on balancing physical stress with proper recovery.
WHOOP devices are approved under ITF rules—as long as the player can show the haptic feedback is turned off.© Getty Images
© Getty Images
WHOOP issued a statement via a spokesperson addressing the situation:“WHOOP believes athletes have a fundamental right to understand their own performance and health—including during competition at events like the Australian Open. WHOOP is approved by the International Tennis Federation for in-match wear and poses no safety, fairness or competitive risk.“Blocking access to personal health data does not protect sport. WHOOP will continue to stand with athletes and our members to defend their right to their data.”It's not the first time players have run afoul of the Australian Open's strict wearables policy. Back in 2022, Naomi Osaka was banned from wearing her signature TAG Heuer Aquaracer watch on court due to its connected smartwatch capabilities.For now, WHOOP will remain on the practice courts at Melbourne Park, where players like Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, Sabalenka and Jessica Pegula have all been spotted tracking their stats with the device on their wrist or tucked under a sweatband.
“WHOOP believes athletes have a fundamental right to understand their own performance and health—including during competition at events like the Australian Open. WHOOP is approved by the International Tennis Federation for in-match wear and poses no safety, fairness or competitive risk.“Blocking access to personal health data does not protect sport. WHOOP will continue to stand with athletes and our members to defend their right to their data.”It's not the first time players have run afoul of the Australian Open's strict wearables policy. Back in 2022, Naomi Osaka was banned from wearing her signature TAG Heuer Aquaracer watch on court due to its connected smartwatch capabilities.For now, WHOOP will remain on the practice courts at Melbourne Park, where players like Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, Sabalenka and Jessica Pegula have all been spotted tracking their stats with the device on their wrist or tucked under a sweatband.
“Blocking access to personal health data does not protect sport. WHOOP will continue to stand with athletes and our members to defend their right to their data.”It's not the first time players have run afoul of the Australian Open's strict wearables policy. Back in 2022, Naomi Osaka was banned from wearing her signature TAG Heuer Aquaracer watch on court due to its connected smartwatch capabilities.For now, WHOOP will remain on the practice courts at Melbourne Park, where players like Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, Sabalenka and Jessica Pegula have all been spotted tracking their stats with the device on their wrist or tucked under a sweatband.
It's not the first time players have run afoul of the Australian Open's strict wearables policy. Back in 2022, Naomi Osaka was banned from wearing her signature TAG Heuer Aquaracer watch on court due to its connected smartwatch capabilities.For now, WHOOP will remain on the practice courts at Melbourne Park, where players like Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, Sabalenka and Jessica Pegula have all been spotted tracking their stats with the device on their wrist or tucked under a sweatband.
For now, WHOOP will remain on the practice courts at Melbourne Park, where players like Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, Sabalenka and Jessica Pegula have all been spotted tracking their stats with the device on their wrist or tucked under a sweatband.
Pegula won a battle of Player's Box podcast co-hosts, dethroning defending champion Keys while defending her favorite dessert.ByDavid KanePublished Jan 26, 2026 copy_link
Published Jan 26, 2026
MELBOURNE, Australia—We knew what was on the line for Madison Keys coming into her Australian Open fourth round with Jessica Pegula—a slice of cheddar apple pie—but Pegula waited for her on-court interview to reveal what had been in store for her had she lost to her good friend on Monday.“I was going to have to wear a Travis Kelce Kansas City Chiefs jersey,” Pegula told CoCo Vandeweghe after a 6-3, 6-4 win over the defending champion. “That definitely gave me extra motivation today.”Pegula and Keys light-heartedly hyped their Round of 16 clash as the first match between two podcast co-hosts—the two share hosting duties with Jennifer Brady and Desirae Krawczyk on *The Player's Box*—but the bet became more serious for the former, whose family has more than a mere emotional stake in the National Football League.
“I was going to have to wear a Travis Kelce Kansas City Chiefs jersey,” Pegula told CoCo Vandeweghe after a 6-3, 6-4 win over the defending champion. “That definitely gave me extra motivation today.”Pegula and Keys light-heartedly hyped their Round of 16 clash as the first match between two podcast co-hosts—the two share hosting duties with Jennifer Brady and Desirae Krawczyk on *The Player's Box*—but the bet became more serious for the former, whose family has more than a mere emotional stake in the National Football League.
Pegula and Keys light-heartedly hyped their Round of 16 clash as the first match between two podcast co-hosts—the two share hosting duties with Jennifer Brady and Desirae Krawczyk on *The Player's Box*—but the bet became more serious for the former, whose family has more than a mere emotional stake in the National Football League.
“Yeah that was bad,” Pegula told me when I asked about the bet in her post-match press conference. “[Madi] was, like, ‘Mine's worse.' I was, like, ‘What are you talking about? My family owns the Bills. This team has owned us in the postseason. Absolutely not, by far worse.'“I saw Iva Jovic in the locker room before I went on, and she was, like, ‘If you lose, that's way worse wearing the Chiefs jersey.' I'm, like, ‘Yeah, all she has to do is eat a piece of pie. What is the big deal?' Yeah, I think that was really some extra motivation, because that would have been a tough moment for me.”The final details of the bet are yet to be hashed out, but Pegula believes Keys will take her sweet-savory lumps courtesy of Brady in Orlando.
“I saw Iva Jovic in the locker room before I went on, and she was, like, ‘If you lose, that's way worse wearing the Chiefs jersey.' I'm, like, ‘Yeah, all she has to do is eat a piece of pie. What is the big deal?' Yeah, I think that was really some extra motivation, because that would have been a tough moment for me.”The final details of the bet are yet to be hashed out, but Pegula believes Keys will take her sweet-savory lumps courtesy of Brady in Orlando.
The final details of the bet are yet to be hashed out, but Pegula believes Keys will take her sweet-savory lumps courtesy of Brady in Orlando.
“I don't think Madi is going to go out of her way to get this pie or cheese, so I think it's going to be a Jenny task,” joked Pegula after reaching a ninth career Grand Slam quarterfinal.“People eat apples with cheese,” she continued emphatically. “It's not that big of a deal. It's definitely not as bad as it sounds. We got off to a bad start because I randomly said it in a recording, and everyone freaked out, because someone pulled up a picture, and if you Google it, it looks really bad. They also Googled it, looked like it was a Kraft single piece of cheese.“I was, ‘Okay, no, get like a good cheese.' Don't put a Kraft, the plastic thing and just put it on there and, like, that sounds really bad. So, you've got to get a good cheese. It's not as bad as everyone thinks.”Pegula knows good tennis in addition to good cheese in Melbourne, breezing into the last eight with the loss of just 17 games. A disappointed but philosophical Keys gave Pegula her props after the match.
“People eat apples with cheese,” she continued emphatically. “It's not that big of a deal. It's definitely not as bad as it sounds. We got off to a bad start because I randomly said it in a recording, and everyone freaked out, because someone pulled up a picture, and if you Google it, it looks really bad. They also Googled it, looked like it was a Kraft single piece of cheese.“I was, ‘Okay, no, get like a good cheese.' Don't put a Kraft, the plastic thing and just put it on there and, like, that sounds really bad. So, you've got to get a good cheese. It's not as bad as everyone thinks.”Pegula knows good tennis in addition to good cheese in Melbourne, breezing into the last eight with the loss of just 17 games. A disappointed but philosophical Keys gave Pegula her props after the match.
“I was, ‘Okay, no, get like a good cheese.' Don't put a Kraft, the plastic thing and just put it on there and, like, that sounds really bad. So, you've got to get a good cheese. It's not as bad as everyone thinks.”Pegula knows good tennis in addition to good cheese in Melbourne, breezing into the last eight with the loss of just 17 games. A disappointed but philosophical Keys gave Pegula her props after the match.
Pegula knows good tennis in addition to good cheese in Melbourne, breezing into the last eight with the loss of just 17 games. A disappointed but philosophical Keys gave Pegula her props after the match.
“Jess does a really good job at taking time away,” said Keys, who felt Pegula was “dictating play” on Rod Laver Arena. “She redirects incredibly well, so it's kind of a catch-22 sometimes with her, because it's almost like the more pace you give her, the quicker the ball is coming back at you.“I think another thing that I don't think she always gets as much credit for is she hits a lot of very deep balls, so you can't really do a whole lot with them, or if you do, you kind of have to take a little bit more of a risk just because she does a really good job of kind of pushing people off of the baseline as she's slowly taking her baseline…So, I think that's always been, I think, in my opinion, her superpower.”Where Pegula's consistency has regularly taken her to this stage at a major tournament since 2021, it's only recently the No. 6 seed has begun to more regularly factor beyond the quarterfinals—a narrative Pegula sees as more media-driven than anything else.“I mean, the fact that I'm putting myself in that many positions I feel like is a feat in itself. I didn't really quite understand that,” said Pegula, a US Open finalist in 2024 and a semifinalist in 2025.
“I think another thing that I don't think she always gets as much credit for is she hits a lot of very deep balls, so you can't really do a whole lot with them, or if you do, you kind of have to take a little bit more of a risk just because she does a really good job of kind of pushing people off of the baseline as she's slowly taking her baseline…So, I think that's always been, I think, in my opinion, her superpower.”Where Pegula's consistency has regularly taken her to this stage at a major tournament since 2021, it's only recently the No. 6 seed has begun to more regularly factor beyond the quarterfinals—a narrative Pegula sees as more media-driven than anything else.“I mean, the fact that I'm putting myself in that many positions I feel like is a feat in itself. I didn't really quite understand that,” said Pegula, a US Open finalist in 2024 and a semifinalist in 2025.
Where Pegula's consistency has regularly taken her to this stage at a major tournament since 2021, it's only recently the No. 6 seed has begun to more regularly factor beyond the quarterfinals—a narrative Pegula sees as more media-driven than anything else.“I mean, the fact that I'm putting myself in that many positions I feel like is a feat in itself. I didn't really quite understand that,” said Pegula, a US Open finalist in 2024 and a semifinalist in 2025.
“I mean, the fact that I'm putting myself in that many positions I feel like is a feat in itself. I didn't really quite understand that,” said Pegula, a US Open finalist in 2024 and a semifinalist in 2025.
Looking to make her first major semifinal outside of Flushing Meadows, she will face fellow American Amanda Anisimova, guaranteeing at least one U.S. woman into the final four.“I think that's great for American tennis,” said Pegula.“Yeah, it's been pretty crazy how well the women have been doing and how many top-ranked girls there are. I'm just happy to be a part of that conversation.”Although for Pegula, any conversation that isn't about Kansas City is probably a great one.
“I think that's great for American tennis,” said Pegula.“Yeah, it's been pretty crazy how well the women have been doing and how many top-ranked girls there are. I'm just happy to be a part of that conversation.”Although for Pegula, any conversation that isn't about Kansas City is probably a great one.
“Yeah, it's been pretty crazy how well the women have been doing and how many top-ranked girls there are. I'm just happy to be a part of that conversation.”Although for Pegula, any conversation that isn't about Kansas City is probably a great one.
Although for Pegula, any conversation that isn't about Kansas City is probably a great one.
Lorenzo Musetti downed fellow Top 10 star Taylor Fritz on Monday at the Australian Open, where the Italian is into his fourth major quarter-final and first in Melbourne.
Combining elite court coverage with his blistering shotmaking, Musetti scored a 6-2, 7-5, 6-4 victory inside Rod Laver Arena to seal a set of quarter-final appearances at the four Slams.
Musetti's Career-Best Result At Each Major
Major Tournament
Best Result
Australian Open
QFs (2026)*
Roland Garros
SFs (2025)
Wimbledon
SFs (2024)
US Open
QFs (2025)
*Active
“I think today [my serve] was really working well,” said Musetti, who struck 13 aces and won 84 per cent of his first-serve points. “I think I made one of my best performances in aces in my career so far, so I'm really, really happy.
“When I finished last season pretty late, the goals were to start well this year, because I'd never surpassed the first week here. Making the final in Hong Kong, winning doubles in Hong Kong [with Lorenzo Sonego] and now being in the quarter-finals, for me, it's really a dream.”
The fifth seed has earned a clash against record 10-time champion Novak Djokovic, who reached the last eight after Czech Jakub Mensik withdrew due to an abdominal muscle injury. Djokovic leads Musetti 9-1 in their Lexus ATP Head2Head series, and will enter Wednesday's meeting on a six-match winning streak against the Italian.
Two days removed from playing a four-hour, 27-minute five-set battle against Tomas Machac, Musetti showed no obvious signs of fatigue under the afternoon sun. Musetti opened his shoulders and dictated play from the baseline, crushing 33 winners and using his heavy top-spin forehand to draw errors from Fritz.
The American struggled early to land his usually reliable serve, finishing the first set with a 42 per cent first-serve percentage, according to Infosys Stats. Though Fritz found more rhythm behind his delivery as the match wore on, he was unable to make inroads on return (0/2 on break points).
Sporting k-tape on both his left and right oblique areas, Fritz called for the physio at 3-2 in the second set. Musetti, a two-time tour-level titlist, broke Fritz to love at 5-5 later that set, allowing him to serve for a two-sets-to-love advantage. Musetti again broke Fritz in the opening game of the third set and rarely looked back, clinching victory after two hours and three minutes. Musetti kept his cool when serving for the match, landing three deft drop shots en route to holding to love.“I definitely improved my serve a lot and especially trying to be more aggressive with the forehand and trying to use my variation to lead the game,” Musetti said when asked about adjustments he's made to improve on hard courts. “Like today, with the forehand trying to open the court and make the opponent move. I think before, I was starting to play too far and I was a little too passive on the rally.
“My coach always keeps telling me to be a little more aggressive and try to go for it, take the lead of the rally. That's what I did today.”
Musetti is competing at a career-high No. 5 in the PIF ATP Rankings this fortnight. Last year, he posted a career-best 45 tour-level match wins and competed at the year-end Nitto ATP Finals for the first time. With his latest win, Musetti improved to 4-3 in his Lexus ATP Head2Head series against Fritz, who beat the Italian in Turin in November. The Italian's victory marked his first hard-court win against Fritz.Here to stay 😤Lorenzo Musetti defeats Fritz 6-2, 7-5, 6-4 to reach the Australian Open quarter-finals for the first time.@AustralianOpen | #AO26 pic.twitter.com/DYXdTDropk— ATP Tour (@atptour) January 26, 2026
The American struggled early to land his usually reliable serve, finishing the first set with a 42 per cent first-serve percentage, according to Infosys Stats. Though Fritz found more rhythm behind his delivery as the match wore on, he was unable to make inroads on return (0/2 on break points).
Sporting k-tape on both his left and right oblique areas, Fritz called for the physio at 3-2 in the second set. Musetti, a two-time tour-level titlist, broke Fritz to love at 5-5 later that set, allowing him to serve for a two-sets-to-love advantage. Musetti again broke Fritz in the opening game of the third set and rarely looked back, clinching victory after two hours and three minutes. Musetti kept his cool when serving for the match, landing three deft drop shots en route to holding to love.
“I definitely improved my serve a lot and especially trying to be more aggressive with the forehand and trying to use my variation to lead the game,” Musetti said when asked about adjustments he's made to improve on hard courts. “Like today, with the forehand trying to open the court and make the opponent move. I think before, I was starting to play too far and I was a little too passive on the rally.
“My coach always keeps telling me to be a little more aggressive and try to go for it, take the lead of the rally. That's what I did today.”
Musetti is competing at a career-high No. 5 in the PIF ATP Rankings this fortnight. Last year, he posted a career-best 45 tour-level match wins and competed at the year-end Nitto ATP Finals for the first time. With his latest win, Musetti improved to 4-3 in his Lexus ATP Head2Head series against Fritz, who beat the Italian in Turin in November. The Italian's victory marked his first hard-court win against Fritz.
Here to stay 😤Lorenzo Musetti defeats Fritz 6-2, 7-5, 6-4 to reach the Australian Open quarter-finals for the first time.@AustralianOpen | #AO26 pic.twitter.com/DYXdTDropk
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Keys was taking the positives after her title defense ended in the fourth round at the hands of good friend Jessica Pegula.ByTENNIS.comPublished Jan 26, 2026 copy_link
Published Jan 26, 2026
© 2026 Getty Images
Madison Keys said she was "proud" of how she handled all that came with returning to the site of her Grand Slam breakthrough at the 2026 Australian Open.Keys, a surprise, if long-awaited, champion at the end of last year's Melbourne fortnight, was taking positives from her return Down Under after her title defense ended in the fourth round at the hands of good friend Jessica Pegula on Monday.Read more: Faced with wearing Travis Kelce jersey, Jessica Pegula serves cheddar apple pie to Madison Keys at Australian Open"Just one of those days where I feel like Jess beat me, and I can kind of walk away with my head held high," she told reporters after the 6-3, 6-4 defeat."Honestly, I'd say it feels way better losing and still being defending champion, because it means you've won. So, again, it's not like the world is ending because I lost today. ... Obviously disappointed, but I'm really trying to not live and die on every single win and loss at this point in my career."
Keys, a surprise, if long-awaited, champion at the end of last year's Melbourne fortnight, was taking positives from her return Down Under after her title defense ended in the fourth round at the hands of good friend Jessica Pegula on Monday.Read more: Faced with wearing Travis Kelce jersey, Jessica Pegula serves cheddar apple pie to Madison Keys at Australian Open"Just one of those days where I feel like Jess beat me, and I can kind of walk away with my head held high," she told reporters after the 6-3, 6-4 defeat."Honestly, I'd say it feels way better losing and still being defending champion, because it means you've won. So, again, it's not like the world is ending because I lost today. ... Obviously disappointed, but I'm really trying to not live and die on every single win and loss at this point in my career."
Read more: Faced with wearing Travis Kelce jersey, Jessica Pegula serves cheddar apple pie to Madison Keys at Australian Open"Just one of those days where I feel like Jess beat me, and I can kind of walk away with my head held high," she told reporters after the 6-3, 6-4 defeat."Honestly, I'd say it feels way better losing and still being defending champion, because it means you've won. So, again, it's not like the world is ending because I lost today. ... Obviously disappointed, but I'm really trying to not live and die on every single win and loss at this point in my career."
"Just one of those days where I feel like Jess beat me, and I can kind of walk away with my head held high," she told reporters after the 6-3, 6-4 defeat."Honestly, I'd say it feels way better losing and still being defending champion, because it means you've won. So, again, it's not like the world is ending because I lost today. ... Obviously disappointed, but I'm really trying to not live and die on every single win and loss at this point in my career."
"Honestly, I'd say it feels way better losing and still being defending champion, because it means you've won. So, again, it's not like the world is ending because I lost today. ... Obviously disappointed, but I'm really trying to not live and die on every single win and loss at this point in my career."
Keys won her first three matches in straight sets, which included a 7-6(6), 6-1 win over Ukrainian Oleksandra Oliynykova in the first round where she trailed 4-0 in the first set and later saved two set points in the ensuing tiebreaker. She also came from 5-2 down in the second set of her 6-1, 7-5 second-round win over compatriot Ashlyn Krueger.After famously retooling her serve ahead of winning the Australian Open a year ago, Keys said she continued to tinker with her game in her return to Melbourne—a commitment she hopes will serve her now and into the future."I'm really proud of myself for being very clear-headed and trying to problem-solve, and I think overall there were a lot of really, a lot of positives from this tournament, and some kind of strides forward," she said."I think that I was open to trying new things, open to trying to implement some of the things that we have been working on, and that's not always the easiest thing to do, especially here, just coming back and having that extra layer of pressure."But for all of those things, I'm super proud of myself for. Then there is a handful of things that I'm going to go back and keep practicing, and I have 11 more months of the year to try to implement them into my game."
After famously retooling her serve ahead of winning the Australian Open a year ago, Keys said she continued to tinker with her game in her return to Melbourne—a commitment she hopes will serve her now and into the future."I'm really proud of myself for being very clear-headed and trying to problem-solve, and I think overall there were a lot of really, a lot of positives from this tournament, and some kind of strides forward," she said."I think that I was open to trying new things, open to trying to implement some of the things that we have been working on, and that's not always the easiest thing to do, especially here, just coming back and having that extra layer of pressure."But for all of those things, I'm super proud of myself for. Then there is a handful of things that I'm going to go back and keep practicing, and I have 11 more months of the year to try to implement them into my game."
"I'm really proud of myself for being very clear-headed and trying to problem-solve, and I think overall there were a lot of really, a lot of positives from this tournament, and some kind of strides forward," she said."I think that I was open to trying new things, open to trying to implement some of the things that we have been working on, and that's not always the easiest thing to do, especially here, just coming back and having that extra layer of pressure."But for all of those things, I'm super proud of myself for. Then there is a handful of things that I'm going to go back and keep practicing, and I have 11 more months of the year to try to implement them into my game."
"I think that I was open to trying new things, open to trying to implement some of the things that we have been working on, and that's not always the easiest thing to do, especially here, just coming back and having that extra layer of pressure."But for all of those things, I'm super proud of myself for. Then there is a handful of things that I'm going to go back and keep practicing, and I have 11 more months of the year to try to implement them into my game."
"But for all of those things, I'm super proud of myself for. Then there is a handful of things that I'm going to go back and keep practicing, and I have 11 more months of the year to try to implement them into my game."
While her barnstorming run to the Daphne Akhurst Memorial Cup was one of the more memorable tournament runs in recent memory—she won five of her seven matches in three sets, saved match points against Iga Swiatek in the semifinals, and denied Aryna Sabalenka a three-peat in the final— Keys added that her best tennis may still be in front of her, even as her 31st birthday approaches next month."I think there is still a lot of runway for things that I can improve on," she said. "I'm definitely finding that there are some things that are harder to kind of change at this point, just because habits are pretty set in their ways."So I feel like there are some things that I'm still picking up easily and just kind of being open to switching, and then there are some things that have just taken a little bit more time to try to fully figure out."I think those are the things that I'm still trying to improve, and those are kind of the things that we just keep going back to. When we have the opportunities to practice them, really emphasizing them and harping on them and trying to get better at them."So there is definitely still, I think, a lot of things that I can get better at, and I think that's still pretty exciting for this point in my career."
"I think there is still a lot of runway for things that I can improve on," she said. "I'm definitely finding that there are some things that are harder to kind of change at this point, just because habits are pretty set in their ways."So I feel like there are some things that I'm still picking up easily and just kind of being open to switching, and then there are some things that have just taken a little bit more time to try to fully figure out."I think those are the things that I'm still trying to improve, and those are kind of the things that we just keep going back to. When we have the opportunities to practice them, really emphasizing them and harping on them and trying to get better at them."So there is definitely still, I think, a lot of things that I can get better at, and I think that's still pretty exciting for this point in my career."
"So I feel like there are some things that I'm still picking up easily and just kind of being open to switching, and then there are some things that have just taken a little bit more time to try to fully figure out."I think those are the things that I'm still trying to improve, and those are kind of the things that we just keep going back to. When we have the opportunities to practice them, really emphasizing them and harping on them and trying to get better at them."So there is definitely still, I think, a lot of things that I can get better at, and I think that's still pretty exciting for this point in my career."
"I think those are the things that I'm still trying to improve, and those are kind of the things that we just keep going back to. When we have the opportunities to practice them, really emphasizing them and harping on them and trying to get better at them."So there is definitely still, I think, a lot of things that I can get better at, and I think that's still pretty exciting for this point in my career."
"So there is definitely still, I think, a lot of things that I can get better at, and I think that's still pretty exciting for this point in my career."
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Ryan Murphy shows us his sweet side.
By
Tony Maglio
It's a love story, FX-on-Hulu viewers, just say yes.
FX has set the premiere date for the inaugural season of Ryan Murphy‘s newest anthology series, Love Story, which is focused on JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette. The debut is timed to Valentine's Day, which is a pretty good scheduling peg. That said, no one wants a Saturday series, so Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette will bow on Thursday, Feb. 12. The season's first three episodes will launch that evening on FX and Hulu (and on Disney+ internationally) beginning at 9 p.m. ET. After that, one new episode of the subsequent six will air/stream each week.
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Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette is inspired by Elizabeth Beller's book Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy. Paul Anthony Kelly will play JFK Jr. and Sarah Pidgeon will portray Bessette.
“It was a love story that captured the attention of the nation: John F. Kennedy Jr. was the closest thing to American royalty. The country watched him grow from a boy to a beloved bachelor and media sensation,” the FX press release, which I guess doubles as a logline, reads. “Carolyn Bessette was a star in her own right. Fiercely independent and with a singular style, she rose from being a sales assistant to an executive at Calvin Klein, and became a trusted confidante of its eponymous founder. John and Carolyn's connection was immediate, electric and undeniable. As their love story unfolded on a national stage, the intense fame and media attention that came along with it threatened to rip them apart.”
JFK Jr. and Bessette-Kennedy died in 1999 when his single-engine airplane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean near Martha's Vineyard. Bessette's sister Lauren Bessette also died. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) determined the cause of the accident to be spatial disorientation while flying over the ocean at night. In its most basic sense, the pilot loses their sense of up and down.
The series also stars Grace Gummer as Caroline Kennedy, Naomi Watts as Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Alessandro Nivola as Calvin Klein, Leila George as Kelly Klein, Sydney Lemmon as Lauren Bessette) and Constance Zimmer as Ann Marie Messina.
OK wait, so here's the actual logline: “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette charts the complex and heartbreaking journey of a couple whose private love became a national obsession.”
Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette is created by Connor Hines and executive produced by Murphy, Nina Jacobson, Brad Simpson, Connor Hines, Eric Kovtun, Nissa Diederich, Scott Robertson, Monica Levinson, Kim Rosenstock, D.V. DeVincentis and Tanase Popa. Max Winkler executive produced and directed the pilot episode; the series is produced by 20th Television.
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The Gorgas bared their toned beach bodies during a Florida getaway over the weekend.
Melissa Gorga flaunted her taut tummy in a striped bikini and flip flops while out in Miami on Sunday with her husband, Joe Gorga, in photos obtained by Page Six.
The 46-year-old completed her coastal look with a straw bucket hat and black Prada sunglasses.
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She later covered up her bathing suit bottoms with a white mesh skirt.
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Joe, for his part, put his muscular figure on display in watermelon-patterned navy board shorts, which he paired with a pink cap and white slides.
The “Real Housewives of New Jersey” stars each gave their Instagram followers a glimpse of their sunny vacation.
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Melissa posted a cheeky snap to her Story, captioned, “Just waiting on dem girls.”
She followed this up with footage of herself out to eat with “Real Housewives of Miami” star Larsa Pippen and more pals.
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As for Joe, the 51-year-old posed with Jonathan Cheban during their “dinna [sic] in Miami.”
He and Melissa have been married since 2004 and share three children — daughter Antonia, 20, son Gino, 18, and son Joey, 15 — who did not appear to join them on the trip.
More than two decades into their marriage, the couple revealed the racy secret to their success on Page Six's “Virtual Reali-Tea” podcast: “Touch[ing] each other.”
During the 2023 sitdown, Joe explained, “You've got to do it. … [Otherwise], you walk around and you become roommates. I don't want a roommate that costs me a lot of money.”
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The pair's relationship struggles, however, have been documented on “RHONJ,” with Melissa admitting to a “rough year and a half” in a 2021 interview.
“We've hit a couple of bumps in the road and we're honest about it and we're fighting for it,” she told Page Six at the time. “It's not easy. It's really not easy. It's not.
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“We're one of the longest standing ‘Housewives' couples,” Melissa proudly acknowledged. “So whatever we're doing, I'm going to pat us on the back.”
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The duo have also butted heads onscreen with Joe's sister, Teresa Giudice — but the family members finally reconciled in October 2025 after a years-long feud.
The Gorgas even spent Christmas with Giudice, 53, and her girls last month.
“It's kind of nice to do it without the cameras, I have to be honest,” Melissa said on “Reality Hot Seat” in December 2025. “We need this time, this healing moment.”
Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) is a minor mess. She's clearly beyond capable at her job as an accountant—or rather, as she repeatedly clarifies, part of the Strategy And Planning department at a consulting firm where various execu-bros think of everyone they don't golf with as some variation on their secretary. But she wears unfashionable shoes and unflattering sweaters. She makes chummy work jokes that already aren't funny before stumbling over her stage-whisper delivery. She brings her lunch from home, and when a bit of tuna fish gets stuck just below her lip before intercepting her new boss Bradley Preston (Dylan O'Brien) for a quick bit of self-promotion, it's not just a casual character note. The camera goes in ultra-close on her mouth, capturing the grotesquerie, and equally close in on Bradley's eyes, alight with horror at the sight of a somewhat older woman who hasn't dolled herself up for him. That's the Sam Raimi touch, baby.
So too, of course, is a jump-scare hallucination of a ghoulish figure. So is a hand jutting out from the earth. And so are the soakings of blood and other fluids in Send Help, Raimi's first R-rated movie in a quarter-century. But those hallmarks come later. The extreme close-ups are just the warning shots, the signs that Raimi is back and ready to mess around. Send Help is his messiest such mess-around since Drag Me To Hell (which somehow squeaked by with a PG-13), and at times feels like a less supernatural companion piece to the most socially conscious of his pure horror films.
Both movies' heroines are bedeviled by their desire to climb the corporate ladder, and the rigged demands placed upon them by their imposing male bosses. Bradley, son of the old boss who promised Linda a substantial promotion, is especially enervating in that regard; we see him behind closed doors (despite his “open-door policy”) blithely telling a subordinate that he'll instead hand Linda's promotion to one of his bros, and ship her out of the main office, to boot. (He really doesn't like tuna. Or, we can infer, women he's not attracted to.) To placate her, he offers more rigged gamesmanship: She can join a corporate trip overseas, help out with crunching numbers, and then wait to be told that, somehow, it simply wasn't enough.
Instead, their plane crashes into the ocean, in a short sequence staged much as you might expect Sam Raimi to stage a plane crash where most of the victims have been painted as wholly unsympathetic: a slapstick midair torture chamber. Linda and Bradly wash ashore on an unknown island, Linda saves her injured boss's life, and the balance of power between them begins to shift.
Bradley requires some direct instruction about this change. O'Brien plays him as a bro version of a Raimi boob complete with Looney Tunes grunts and growls of frustration that would make his spiritual (and, via one brief photograph, on-screen) father Bruce Campbell proud, and Bradley's first instinct is to keep treating Linda as an underling. As such, he continues issuing the kind of asinine non-suggestion directives (like explaining that Linda should build a larger fire) that anyone who has ever held a corporate office job will recognize as typical orders from on high. Linda, who happens to be obsessed with Survivor, lands on this island with surprisingly vast knowledge about obtaining water, food, and shelter. As with her job, she's done the homework; unlike her job, the satisfaction of this work gives her an extra glow. Her hair even flowers into island curls. The movie follows the multitude of tensions that develop as the pair spends more time together without rescue, nursing conflicting ideas about how to handle their predicament.
To explain further would risk spoiling the movie's give and take—though what's genuinely unpredictable about Send Help isn't the literal plotting, where several turns, however satisfying, are obviously telegraphed. No, Raimi and the screenwriters instead keep the audience off-balance by getting playfully coy about who or what we should be rooting for in this situation. Linda is the more obviously sympathetic party, but as fun as it is to see her take charge—to see McAdams literally go ham by hunting a fearsome wild boar—Raimi has thornier gender politics than will allow an uncomplicated dose of Good For Her cinema. Early on, he's unsparing about depicting Linda as an awkward dork, even going so far as to give her a barely-sublimated attraction to her handsome, younger boss. When Bradly ungratefully accuses her of playing “homemaker” on the beach, he's being deeply condescending, and the movie knows this. Yet there's a growing sense that the filmmakers don't entirely disagree, either.
So alongside Linda's old-fashioned and thwarted idea that simply working with dedication and skill at her job will result in her ultimate reward, the movie plants an even-older-fashioned hint that she might well enjoy serving as some '60s-style combination of coworker, subordinate, and domestic partner. On the island, she can become the Work Wife who won't be ignored. Drag Me To Hell saw fit to specifically and moralistically punish a young woman for giving in to the demands of capitalism, by unleashing a wronged hag upon her; in this case, the potentially compromised heroine threatens to turn into that classic blood-soaked, Raimi-approved shrieking hag herself. Both movies depict men behaving in a venal and immoral fashion, nonetheless overshadowed by (or at least in competition with) the unladylike transgressions of women's base designs. It seems possible that Raimi's view of womanhood—damsel in distress, evil hag, or hag in distress—may be somewhat limited.
As with Drag, this doesn't ruin the fun. If anything, it gives the movie an exploitation-friendly edge that many contemporary thrillers are far too self-congratulatory to even consider. Besides the fact that Send Help doesn't attempt anything as simple as a single, gendered sympathy flip, putting McAdams in the lead role changes the potentially regressive calculus of Linda Liddle. McAdams and O'Brien both give performances that could be described as interestingly caricatured while still managing to find a surprising emotional range from scene to scene. That's especially true of McAdams, who locates genuine hurt and anguish whenever Linda seems ready to heel-turn, and also breaks bad with abandon when required. Linda becomes an indelible and complicated character in a way that the lead of Drag Me To Hell never quite achieves.
Send Help doesn't merge Raimi's fever-pitch flourishes with human frailties, whether dramatic or comic, quite so well as Spider-Man 2 or Army Of Darkness. It's also not as wild a mayhem machine as some of his earlier genre workouts. As only his second non-IP movie since the original Spider-Man, it's actually a reminder of how relatively few horror thrillers he's made with this kind of semi-realistic grounding (that nonetheless doesn't prevent the camera from careening around the sometimes soundstage-like environment when called upon). As much as some of the imagery feels like Raimi playing the hits, Send Help also suggests a later-career shift for the filmmaker, one where his comic-book throwbacks run into (or over?) contemporary obstacles without losing their go-for-broke loopiness. It can get messy. Good for him.
Director: Sam Raimi
Writers: Damian Shannon, Mark Swift
Starring: Rachel McAdams, Dylan O'Brien
Release Date: January 30, 2026
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Laura Lancaster and Nick Pepper are leaving the studio, while Netflix alum Blair Fetter joins as head of genre series.
By
Rick Porter
Television Business Editor
A few months into his time as head of global television for Amazon MGM Studios, Peter Friedlander is undertaking a significant reorganization of the TV team.
Under former head Vernon Sanders, Amazon MGM's TV division had been structured around wholly owned series and co-productions. Starting “immediately,” Friedlander wrote in a memo to staff Monday, the studio will switch to genre-based teams for both development and current programming: drama and comedy, worldbuilding (i.e., fantasy, sci-fi and other “genre” series), animation and unscripted.
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Laura Lancaster and Nick Pepper, who had headed the co-production and wholly owned teams previously, are departing their roles but are in talks to enter producing deals at Amazon MGM, Friedlander noted. Netflix alum Blair Fetter will join Amazon MGM on Feb. 2 as head of worldbuilding and genre series, reporting to Friedlander. Newly hired unscripted head Jenn Levy and animation head Melissa Wolfe will continue to lead those groups; Fetter, Levy and Wolfe will all report directly to Friedlander.
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The studio is currently searching for an executive to lead the drama and comedy team; in the meantime, Kara Smith, Michael McDonald, and Jen Chambers will oversee comedy, drama and YA programming and report to Friedlander.
“By organizing around these specialized genres with dedicated leadership, we will move faster, make sharper creative decisions, and continue to build groundbreaking series that define the future of television,” Friedlander wrote in his memo (read it in full, below).
Friedlander joined Amazon MGM Studios in early October after 14 years at Netflix, where he was one of the longest-serving creative executives at the company. The reorg brings Amazon MGM's structure into line with many other studios whose development and current teams run along genre lines.
Fetter was most recently head of spectacle series at Netflix and has worked on series including Stranger Things, Ozark and The Queen's Gambit, among others. Deadline first reported the news.
Friedlander's memo is below.
All,I'm writing to announce a new organizational structure for the Scripted Series team at Amazon MGM Studios, designed to accelerate our mission of delivering exceptional original television that captivates audiences worldwide. Effective immediately, we are transitioning from our current structure—split between Wholly Owned and Co-Productions—to a streamlined, genre-based organization (drama & comedy, worldbuilding, animation, and unscripted). Both Development and Current will reside in this new framework, which will provide greater clarity, specialized expertise, and clear ownership across our entire portfolio. As part of this evolution, Laura Lancaster and Nick Pepper will be transitioning out of the organization. Producing deal conversations are underway. Nick and Laura have been invaluable builders of our scripted series slate, and we are deeply grateful for their significant contributions to our success. Laura has made incredible contributions to Prime Video's programming successes as she and her team have led the creative oversight of The Summer I Turned Pretty, Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power, Fallout, Reacher, The Terminal List, The Better Sister, We Were Liars, amongst many others, as well as upcoming series such as Spider-Noir, Blade Runner 2099, Scarpetta, and God of War. Nick was the driving force behind the critically acclaimed Prime Video series Overcompensating and the upcoming titles Tomb Raider, Elle, Young Sherlock, and Carrie. In addition, Nick has built a bold and distinctive animation slate, including Secret Level, Hazbin Hotel, Helluva Boss, and two of Critical Role's premium campaigns, Vox Machina and Mighty Nein.With this transition, I'm pleased to announce that Blair Fetter is joining Amazon MGM Studios as Head of Worldbuilding & Genre Series, reporting to me starting February 2nd. Blair brings outstanding experience from Netflix, where he oversaw Spectacle Series and was essential to the success of shows such as Stranger Things, Ozark, The Queen's Gambit, Death by Lightning, BoJack Horseman, The Haunting of Hill House and 3 Body Problem. His ability to discover and develop expansive worlds paired with his commitment to high-quality storytelling makes him an ideal addition to my leadership team. Tom Lieber and Matt King will report to Blair, continuing to focus on our Worldbuilding genre programming.As previously announced, Jenn Levy has joined as Head of Unscripted and Documentary Television. Melissa Wolfe will continue as Head of Animation, now reporting directly to me. For our Drama, Comedy, and Young Adult programming, Kara Smith, Michael McDonald, and Jen Chambers will report to me on an interim basis until we finalize the structure and put in place a new Head of Drama & Comedy Series. With these changes, Lauren O'Connor, Head of Global IP, will now report directly to me. Lindsay Sloane, who leads MGM Television, Scripted Series, will also continue to report to me.By organizing around these specialized genres with dedicated leadership, we will move faster, make sharper creative decisions, and continue to build groundbreaking series that define the future of television. I'm energized by the opportunities ahead and confident in this team's ability to deliver for our customers and the creative community in which we work.Thanks all, Peter
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Lauren Sánchez and Jeff Bezos are painting the town red — and silver — in Paris.
The former journalist, 56, and her billionaire husband, 62, kicked off Haute Couture Week on Monday, attending the Schiaparelli and Dior Spring 2026 fashion shows in the City of Light.
Sánchez cut a striking figure in a fire-engine red skirt suit at the first show of the day, (accidentally?) coordinating with front-row seat-mate Anna Wintour, who arrived in a red-striped coat.
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Sánchez accessorized with matching red suede pumps and red-tinged sunglasses. She added a standout alligator Schiaparelli handbag adorned with the house's signature surrealist face motif, complete with gilded lips and nose.
If she placed an order off the runway, it wouldn't be the first time: she wore a corseted gown from the Spring 2025 collection to kick off her lavish Venice nuptials to Bezos in June of last year.
The Amazon founder, meanwhile, complemented his wife at the runway show in a sleek all-black ensemble, but more striking was his new silver beard, which he's been growing out this winter.
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Later the same day, the pair arrived hand-in-hand at Jonathan Anderson's Dior couture debut. Sánchez switched to a blue-gray fur-trimmed skirt suit while Bezos opted for navy.
The fashion week appearances come as the couple prepares to serve as primary donors for the 2026 Met Gala on May 4.
They'll join secondary sponsors Saint Laurent and Condé Nast in funding the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute exhibition “Costume Art.”
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In between shows, Sánchez was photographed out for lunch with Wintour, who has publicly defended the pair amid criticism of their Met sponsorship.
“I think Lauren is going to be a wonderful asset to the museum and to the event,” the Vogue global editorial director told CNN. “We're very grateful for her incredible generosity.”
The philanthropist has also been making the rounds at Paris hotspots like Siena restaurant, where she had dinner Sunday night in an athleisure black catsuit paired with a cropped white fur coat.
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The Bezoses have become fixtures on the fashion circuit. In October, they attended Paris Fashion Week, where they caught new Chanel creative director Matthieu Blazy' debut show under the French fashion label and sat front row at Balenciaga.
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When Rob Reiner cast Kathy Bates in “Misery,” there was a sense that lightning had struck twice. Not just because Bates was unknown as an actor, but because Reiner truly understood how to use a performer's perceived softness as its own weapon of suspense. The legendary film from 1990 hinges on Bates' all-consuming transformation into Annie Wilkes, a mousy woman dismissed by the world only to reveal her vindictive nature when the rules collapse.
Sam Raimi's “Send Help” operates in a similar register with a crucial, modern twist. Rachel McAdams is not a secret waiting to be unearthed. She's an Oscar nominee (“Spotlight”), a romantic icon (“The Notebook”), and one of the great comedic villains of the 21st century (“Mean Girls”). Casting her opposite Dylan O'Brien in a two-hander survival horror-comedy might sound, on paper, like a miscalculation. Dropping a full-blown movie star into a role that demands humiliation, restraint, and a willingness to look foolish can backfire. But here, it's a multiplying factor, and McAdams' star power doesn't flatten “Send Help” but electrifies it.
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The most purely enjoyable Raimi film in years, the upcoming desert island debacle from 20th Century Studios is an ideal synthesis of the director's career thus far. It's got the gruesome ingenuity from his breakout debut, “The Evil Dead,” fused with the pop-comic precision that made him a revolutionary force for Sony's original “Spider-Man.” Ghastly without being grim and morally queasy without being mean, “Send Help” delivers its biggest laughs and gasps through brilliantly managed physical suffering. That includes what may be Raimi's finest puke gag since “Drag Me to Hell,” and a vintage gross-out approach to black comedy that's executed with the confidence of someone who knows where to draw his line in the sand.
Meet Linda Liddle (McAdams), a long-suffering corporate underling dragged on an international business trip after getting passed up for a promotion. Her new boss, Bradley Preston (O'Brien), is a passive-aggressive tyrant with “American Psycho” instincts. But boundless entitlement and a gift for micromanagement can't save him when their plane crashes in the Gulf of Thailand. He and Linda are the only two survivors, and with HR nowhere to be found, that fact immediately flips their dynamic. The kind of boss who would crawl inside your abdomen instead of turning down the air-conditioning, Bradley suddenly can't function without Linda. What's worse, he's got a bum leg and couldn't outrun her (or any other threat) if he tried.
Raimi and screenwriters Damian Shannon and Mark Swift (“Freddy vs. Jason,” “Friday the 13th,” “Baywatch”) waste no time turning the island into a pressure cooker. At first, the setting feels pulled from grounded survival dramas like “Cast Away” or “The Impossible.” But Linda, armed with decades of “Survivor” knowledge and the quiet competence of someone who's always cleaning up other people's messes, thrives with cartoonish joy. Shortly after washing ashore, she builds shelter, starts a fire, collects water, goes fishing, and adopts a breezy efficiency that borders on smug. Soon, she's carved her name into a cup and woven herself a backpack: territorial gestures that mirror the small ways she once claimed space in the office.
Simultaneously, Bradley collapses in the absence of capitalism. He refuses to eat, complains about sunburn, and rejects the reality of the hell he's living in with relentless tenacity. His attempts at survival are so inept they feel like a self-own, and the jungle's creatures (rendered with goofy digital effects that are visually consistent enough to feel acceptable) seem to exist solely to punish him. The longer the torture goes on, the more “Send Help” starts to resemble Linda's wish fulfillment. Caught somewhere between “Office Space” and “I Spit on Your Grave,” it's a workplace nightmare stripped to its rawest, most relatable revenge components.
That's where McAdams becomes indispensable. As Linda Liddle (a name that even sounds cut from the same cloth as Annie Wilkes), she's still an impossibly luminous presence. Introduced trudging around her sad little apartment in an oversized robe, talking to a pet cockatiel, McAdams can't hide who audiences know her to be. Even after colliding with Bradley on his first day as CEO and promptly spitting a tuna fish sandwich on him, Linda remains quietly glamorous and adorable. But McAdams' performance is so rigorously committed that dissonance becomes the point and her oceanside glow-up steers the film's second half.
Like Anne Hathaway's Andy Sachs in “The Devil Wears Prada,” Linda could sacrifice more of her dignity for her boss. But on some level, she chooses not to, and that restraint makes the island's psychological games all the richer. Trapped but still killing it, Linda isn't just retaliating; she's recalibrating a balance that's been wrong for years. When Bradley and his C-suite cronies mock her “Survivor” audition tape on the flight over, hot tears stream down Linda's face. But by the time she's standing over Bradley's body on the beach, she's radiant with capability, embodying a reversal of audience expectations that's both satisfying and clever. In the end, McAdams' sexiness isn't incidental, but integral to how she's been misjudged.
To his credit, O'Brien never overplays Bradley as the monster. Instead, he's indifferent and greedy, brandishing a laziness that's suffocating and a demeanor that's innately manipulative. He's the kind of man who thinks he's charming because his employees can't say no to him, and Raimi shows strong tonal control in how much he lets Linda punish him — allowing Bradley's torment to feel earned rather than sadistic, even as he blubbers, vomits, and otherwise pays dearly. The parable that follows him could be ripped straight from “Tales from the Crypt,” offering a bold outline to a campy grudge match that shines brightest in its ethically gray framing.
“Send Help” walks a treacherous line between cruelty and catharsis and, despite the dicy subject matter, somehow never tips into nihilism. The violence is sharp, and the comedy is clean, with Raimi observing his world's details with a hunter's precision. Whether it's Linda's skin warming into a confident tan, or Bradley's expensive dress shoes growing thick with grime, Raimi almost seems to sit alongside us, gently suggesting whose side we're on and when. Conversations between Linda and Bradley play like a high-stakes battle of wits, but their director is never so far away as to make the match feel lawless.
The result — labor satire that hits without feeling like a prestige think piece — is uncanny in its timeliness. Linda's isolated, bachelorette existence and the casual judgment she faces for it mirrors a world that's increasingly hostile to women who choose to be single (though her backstory proves more complex than that). If “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” proved Raimi could juggle infinite self-referential, superhero jokes, “Send Help” applies that same dexterity to a more universally funny concept. In an era where originality struggles to be rewarded, this feels like a genuine studio win for genre fans.
The opposite of an endurance test, Raimi's latest ultimately leaves you in a sense of glee. Crescendoing into a perfect punchline (one that satisfies whether you see it coming or not), Raimi doesn't pull punches — but he doesn't swing aimlessly either. Rather, he meets the audience's blood lust with the rare survival thriller you wish would go on longer. Yes, the glossy aesthetic occasionally dulls the impact of the director's more tactile sensibilities, and a few script contrivances stretch believability. Still, these are quibbles, not cracks, and they're easy to ignore.
Wickedly lovable with the potential to be timeless, “Send Help” is controlled delirium microwaved on high heat. At 66, Raimi reminds us who he was when he made horror-comedy history with “Evil Dead II,” and more importantly, why his voice still matters. Watching McAdams snarl and strategize, you can practically imagine how much fun Raimi would've had handing her a chainsaw in the '80s. He still splatters her with blood here, proving it's never too late for the right collaboration, and that neither he nor McAdams should ever be underestimated.
From 20th Century Studios, “Send Help” is in theaters January 30.
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By Denise Petski
Senior Managing Editor
Hulu has set April 8 for the premiere of The Testaments, the forthcoming sequel series to The Handmaid's Tale, based on Margaret Atwood's novel of the same name.
Created by Handmaid's Tale showrunner and executive producer Bruce Miller, the coming-of-age story is set in the dystopian theocracy of Gilead more than 15 years after the events of The Handmaid's Tale, that finds a new generation of young women grappling with the bleak future that awaits them. Handmaid's Tale lead Elisabeth Moss also serves as an executive producer.
It will premiere with the first three episodes on April 8, followed by one new episode weekly thereafter. The series will be available on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+ for bundle subscribers in the U.S. and on Disney+ internationally.
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Per the official logline, the series follows young teens Agnes, dutiful and pious, and Daisy, a new arrival and convert from beyond Gilead's borders. As they navigate the gilded halls of Aunt Lydia's elite preparatory school for future wives, a place where obedience is instilled brutally and always with divine justification, their bond becomes the catalyst that will upend their past, their present, and their future.
Principal cast includes Ann Dowd, Chase Infiniti, Lucy Halliday, Mabel Li, Amy Seimetz, Brad Alexander, Rowan Blanchard, Mattea Conforti, Zarrin Darnell-Martin, Eva Foote, Isolde Ardies, Shechinah Mpumlwana, Birva Pandya, and Kira Guloien.
Miller executive produces along with Warren Littlefield, Moss, Steve Stark, Shana Stein, Maya Goldsmith, John Weber, Sheila Hockin, Daniel Wilson, Fran Sears, and Mike Barker, who will also direct the first three episodes. The Testaments is produced by MGM Television.
See first-look photos of The Testaments here.
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By Nellie Andreeva
Co-Editor-in-Chief, TV
EXCLUSIVE: Amazon MGM Studios‘ new Head of Global Television Peter Friedlander is putting his stamp by restructuring the studio's scripted series team and bringing in Blair Fetter who previously worked with him at Netflix.
Leaving as part of the reorg are the two top scripted executives under previous Amazon MGM Studios TV head Vernon Sanders: Laura Lancaster as Head of US SVOD TV Development and Series – Co-Productions and Nick Pepper as Head of US SVOD TV Development and Series – Wholly Owned. Both are in talks for producing deals with the streaming studio.
“Effective immediately, we are transitioning from our current structure — split between Wholly Owned and Co-Productions — to a streamlined, genre-based organization (drama & comedy, worldbuilding, animation, and unscripted),” Friedlander said in a memo announcing the changes, which you can read in full below. The realignment, which bears some resemblance to Netflix's scripted series executive structure, impacts both development and current.
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Each of the four genre areas will be led by an executive who will be a Friedlander direct report.
Fetter, who starts February 2, will be Head of Worldbuilding & Genre Series. That is right up his alley as Fetter most recently oversaw Spectacle Series at Netflix.
Tom Lieber, Head, Co-Production Genre Development and Current Series under Lancaster, who has overseen The Boys universe, Fallout, and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, and Matt King, who was on Pepper's team, will continue to work on worldbuilding genre programming, now reporting to Fetter.
A Head of Drama & Comedy Series will be named soon. Kara Smith, most recently Head, Co-Production Drama, Comedy Development and Current Series under Lancaster; Michael McDonald, Head of the Comedy and Drama Development – US SVOD TV Development and Series – Wholly Owned under Pepper; and Jen Chambers, Head of Creative Synergy & Development on Pepper's team, will be working across drama, comedy, and young adult programming under the new Head of Drama & Comedy. They will report to Friedlander in the meantime. Smith has been involved in the development of some of Prime Video's biggest hits from outside studios, including The Summer I Turned Pretty and Reacher.
Melissa Wolfe will continue as Head of Animation. Previously under Pepper, she will now be reporting directly to Friedlander. Also reporting to Friedlander is Jenn Levy, the Netflix alumna he recently brought in as the streamer's new Head of Unscripted and Documentary Television.
Additionally, Lauren O'Connor, Head of Global IP, who previously reported to Pepper, will now report directly to Friedlander. Lindsay Sloane, Head of MGM Television, Scripted Series, will also continue to report to Friedlander.
The restructuring comes four months after former Netflix Head of UCAN (U.S. and Canada) Scripted Series Friedlander joined Amazon. He took time to familiarize himself with the TV studio's executive team and its development slate while plotting his strategy.
While doing that, Friedlander has been keeping things largely close to the vest. Speculation about the pending reorg picked up momentum earlier this month as he is expected to present the new structure at a town hall that has been scheduled for later this week.
Amazon MGM Studios' TV operations went through quite a few rounds of restructuring over the past several years with lines between programming areas drawn and redrawn to a point where many producers and agents felt confused whom to pitch a particular project. When Friedlander took over, there was expectation that he would streamline the way the TV division operates while building his own team. In doing so, he met with a number of executives – both internally and externally.
“By organizing around these specialized genres with dedicated leadership, we will move faster, make sharper creative decisions, and continue to build groundbreaking series that define the future of television,” Friedlander said in the memo. “I'm energized by the opportunities ahead and confident in this team's ability to deliver for our customers and the creative community in which we work.”
Pepper and Lancaster joined Amazon in 2021 and were named to their most recent roles in 2022 as part of a restructuring of the scripted team.
Since then, Pepper has spearheaded the exploration of the MGM library of IP for television following Amazon's $8.5B acquisition of the 100-year-old studio, which has resulted in several greenlights to date, including Legally Blonde prequel Elle, Tomb Raider and Carrie. Additionally, he has worked on building a slate of owned YA series, including Overcompensation, and the upcoming Off Campus and Carrie, and has overseen animation with slate that includes Secret Level and Hazbin Hotel.
Lancaster was originally brought in to oversee the ongoing series for Prime Video. She and her team have shepherded several series that have gone to multiple seasons, with some growing season-to-season, most notably The Summer I Turned Pretty. Other shows under her purview included Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power, Fallout, Reacher, The Terminal List and We Were Liars.
“Nick and Laura have been invaluable builders of our scripted series slate, and we are deeply grateful for their significant contributions to our success,” Friedlander said.
Before joining Amazon, Lancaster was Alcon Television Group President and head of drama at NBC; Pepper was President of Legendary Television and Head of Television for the Mark Gordon Company.
Fetter left Netflix after more than 13 years in October, two months after Friedlander's exit. Fetter has been rumored to follow Friedlander to Amazon MGM Studios ever since, though, according to sources, he met with other companies too.
During his Netflix tenure, Fetter worked on such series as Ozark, The Queen's Gambit, Stranger Things, BoJack Horseman, 3 Body Problem, Godless, Big Mouth, Haunting of Hill House and Death by Lightning.
“His ability to discover and develop expansive worlds paired with his commitment to high-quality storytelling makes him an ideal addition to my leadership team,” Friedlander said of Fetter.
Before joining Netflix, Fetter worked on HBO's Big Love, on which Friedlander was a producer and executive for Playtone. Fetter started as an assistant before being promoted to associate producer on the show. He made the move to Netflix six months after Friedlander had gotten there.
Amazon MGM Studios' international originals, led by Nicole Clemens, falls under VP Kelly Day who reports to Mike Hopkins, Head of Prime Video & Amazon MGM, as does Friedlander.
Here is Friedlander's email:
I'm writing to announce a new organizational structure for the Scripted Series team at Amazon MGM Studios, designed to accelerate our mission of delivering exceptional original television that captivates audiences worldwide. Effective immediately, we are transitioning from our current structure — split between Wholly Owned and Co-Productions — to a streamlined, genre-based organization (drama & comedy, worldbuilding, animation, and unscripted). Both Development and Current will reside in this new framework, which will provide greater clarity, specialized expertise, and clear ownership across our entire portfolio. As part of this evolution, Laura Lancaster and Nick Pepper will be transitioning out of the organization. Deal conversations are underway. Nick and Laura have been invaluable builders of our scripted series slate, and we are deeply grateful for their significant contributions to our success. Laura has made incredible contributions to Prime Video's programming successes as she and her team have led the creative oversight of The Summer I Turned Pretty, Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power, Fallout, Reacher, The Terminal List, The Better Sister, We Were Liars, amongst many others, as well as upcoming series such as Spider-Noir, Blade Runner 2099, Scarpetta, and God of War. Nick was the driving force behind the critically acclaimed Prime Video series Overcompensating and the upcoming titles Tomb Raider, Elle, Young Sherlock, and Carrie. In addition, Nick has built a bold and distinctive animation slate, including Secret Level, Hazbin Hotel, Helluva Boss, and two of Critical Role's premium campaigns, Vox Machina and Mighty Nein.With this transition, I'm pleased to announce that Blair Fetter is joining Amazon MGM Studios as Head of Worldbuilding & Genre Series, reporting to me starting February 2nd. Blair brings outstanding experience from Netflix, where he oversaw Spectacle Series and was essential to the success of shows such as Stranger Things, Ozark, The Queen's Gambit, Death by Lightning, BoJack Horseman, The Haunting of Hill House and 3 Body Problem. His ability to discover and develop expansive worlds paired with his commitment to high-quality storytelling makes him an ideal addition to my leadership team. Tom Lieber and Matt King will report to Blair, continuing to focus on our Worldbuilding genre programming. As previously announced, Jenn Levy has joined as Head of Unscripted and Documentary Television. Melissa Wolfe will continue as Head of Animation, now reporting directly to me. For our Drama, Comedy, and Young Adult programming, Kara Smith, Michael McDonald, and Jen Chambers will report to me on an interim basis until we finalize the structure and put in place a new Head of Drama & Comedy Series. With these changes, Lauren O'Connor, Head of Global IP, will now report directly to me. Lindsay Sloane, who leads MGM Television, Scripted Series, will also continue to report to me. By organizing around these specialized genres with dedicated leadership, we will move faster, make sharper creative decisions, and continue to build groundbreaking series that define the future of television. I'm energized by the opportunities ahead and confident in this team's ability to deliver for our customers and the creative community in which we work.Peter
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What is shocking is how long Lancaster lasted. Thank God.
Thank God!!!
LOL! Clearing out more Salke/Sanders holdovers is only good news. Still a few more left on the film side.
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"I regret and am deeply mortified by my actions in that state, and am committed to accountability," he wrote.
By
Michael Saponara
Ye (formerly Kanye West) issued yet another apology, as Yeezy took out a full-page ad in the Jan. 26 edition of The Wall Street Journal, which saw him apologize to the Jewish community for his antisemitic hate speech in recent years.
West also addressed the Black community, as well as “those I've hurt” due to his erratic behavior and outlandish declarations. The Chicago native cited his well-documented 2002 car crash, during which he broke his jaw, as causing some brain damage that may have led to his behavior.
“Twenty-five years ago, I was in a car accident that broke my jaw and caused injury to the right frontal lobe of my brain,” he wrote. “At the time, the focus was on the visible damage — the fracture, the swelling and the immediate physical trauma. The deeper injury, the one inside my skull, went unnoticed.”
West explained that the brain injury wasn't properly diagnosed and led to mental health issues such as bipolar disorder. (A 2023 case report titled “Bipolar Disorder Due to Traumatic Brain Injury” published by the National Institutes of Health noted that “people with TBI are 1.28 times more likely to have bipolar disorder,” especially if the injury happened between the ages of 11 and 15. The report also noted that “it is believed that TBI causes brain inflammation, which can lead to mental health issues.”)
“Bipolar disorder comes with its own defense system,” he added. “Denial. When you're manic, you don't think you're sick. You think everyone else is overreacting. You feel like you're seeing the world more clearly than ever, when in reality you're losing your grip entirely.”
Ye continued: “I said and did things I deeply regret. Some of the people I love the most, I treated the worst. You endured fear, confusion, humiliation and the exhaustion of trying to love someone who was, at times, unrecognizable. Looking back, I became detached from my true self.”
Digging deeper, West addressed his use of the swastika, which he had put on Yeezy merchandise. Some of the “disconnected moments” led to memory lapses that he claims to still be unable to recall.
“In that fractured state, I gravitated toward the most destructive symbol I could find, the swastika, and even sold T-shirts bearing it,” he wrote. Ye noted in his ad that he's “committed to accountability,” and emphatically stated that he's “not a Nazi” and has “love for Jewish people.”
“One of the difficult aspects of having bipolar type-1 are the disconnected moments — many of which I still cannot recall — that led to poor judgment and reckless behavior that oftentimes feels like an out-of-body-experience. I regret and am deeply mortified by my actions in that state, and am committed to accountability, treatment and meaningful change,” he wrote. “It does not excuse what I did, though. I am not a Nazi or an antisemite. I love Jewish people.”
The Anti-Defamation League called Ye's apology “long overdue” in a statement shared with Billboard. “Ye's apology to the Jewish people is long overdue and doesn't automatically undo his long history of antisemitism — the antisemitic ‘Heil Hitler' song he created, the hundreds of tweets, the swastikas and myriad Holocaust references — and all of the feelings of hurt and betrayal it caused,” an ADL spokesman said. “The truest apology would be for him to not engage in antisemitic behavior in the future. We wish him well on the road to recovery.”
Ye also detailed how he fell into a “manic episode” that saw him destroy his life early last year, to the point he questioned if he wanted to live anymore.
“I am so sorry to have let you down. I love us. In early 2025, I fell into a four-month long manic episode of psychotic, paranoid and impulsive behavior that destroyed my life,” he revealed. “As the situation became increasingly unsustainable, there were times I didn't want to be here anymore.”
West added he has discovered a “newfound” clarity in life, along with an “effective” regimen of medication mixed with therapy and exercise to continue to make strides in his battle. He closed with an ask — not for sympathy, but for patience moving forward.
“As I find my new baseline and new center through an effective regime of medication, therapy, exercise, and clean living, I have newfound, much-needed clarity. I am pouring my energy into positive, meaningful art: music, clothing, design, and other new ideas to help the world,” he concluded. “I'm not asking for sympathy, or a free pass, though I aspire to earn your forgiveness. I write today simply to ask for your patience and understanding as I find my way home.”
Ye's series of antisemitic remarks in 2022 led to companies such as Balenciaga, Universal Music Group, Adidas and Gap all cutting ties with him. He also met with Rabbi Yoshiyahu Yosef Pinto in November 2025 to take responsibility and apologize to the Jewish community.
On the music side, West is preparing to release his next album, which is titled Bully. He's slated to make his return to the stage as well later this month with a pair of shows (Jan. 30, Jan. 31) in Mexico City.
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After years of inflammatory social-media posts and antisemitic invective, Kanye West has taken out a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal that traces his erratic behavior to his 2002 car crash. West, who now goes by Ye, published the open letter, “To Those I've Hurt,” as he prepares to release a new album, Bully. He claims that various medical issues over the years—which share characteristics with bipolar 1 disorder and autism, he says—could be linked to right frontal lobe damage from the crash that inspired his breakout single “Through the Wire.” He also describes “disconnected moments” that have left him in a state akin to “an out-of-body experience,” adding, “It does not excuse what I did, though. I am not a Nazi or an antisemite.”
West blames his turn in mental health on a medical oversight after the crash. At the time, he writes, “the focus was on the visible damage—the fracture, the swelling, and the immediate physical trauma. The deeper injury, the one inside my skull, went unnoticed. Comprehensive scans were not done, neurological exams were limited, and the possibility of a frontal-lobe injury was never raised. It wasn't properly diagnosed until 2023.”
The escalation of West's outbursts of racial hatred began in 2022, when he posted, on the platform then called Twitter, that he wanted to go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.” (Adidas and Gap dropped their partnerships with Yeezy; the former company estimated the cost of the termination to be $246 million.) Soon after the platform's acquisition by Elon Musk later that year, West posted an image on X of a swastika inside the Star of David, leading to another temporary ban. Around the same time, he sold swastika T-shirts through a custom website and appeared on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones' InfoWars alongside the white supremacist, antisemite, and Holocaust denier Nicholas J. Fuentes. West praised Hitler and the Nazis, echoing rhetoric he has reportedly espoused in private for many years. His use of the swastika, he writes now, was a product of his “fractured state,” as he reached for “the most destructive symbol [he] could find.”
In February 2025, West returned to X and posted a series of comments that were homophobic, racist, misogynistic, and ableist, reiterating his pro-Nazi remarks. That May, he released “Heil Hitler” and the similarly themed “WW3,” songs that were removed by streaming services but widely shared on X. He writes now, “In early 2025, I fell into a four-month long manic episode of psychotic, paranoid and impulsive behavior that destroyed my life. As the situation became increasingly unsustainable, there were times I didn't want to be here anymore.”
In late 2024, two women sued West, one for sexual battery and the other for sexual assault, over alleged incidents earlier in his career. The woman who brought the former lawsuit, West's former assistant Lauren Pisciotta, said he had drugged her at a party thrown by Sean “Diddy” Combs, whom West defended in his February 2025 posts. West denied her claims. In an updated filing, Pisciotta claimed last July that she had gone into hiding after a “swatting” campaign that she believes West initiated. West does not address allegations of sexual misconduct in his letter.
As part of what he describes as a “newfound, much-needed clarity,” he tries to make amends for his undermining of the Black Lives Matter movement—presumably with regard to provocations such as wearing a M.A.G.A. hat and “White Lives Matter” T-shirt and saying that slavery “sounds like a choice.” He writes, “To the black community—which held me down through all of the highs and lows and the darkest of times. The black community is, unquestionably, the foundation of who I am. I am so sorry to have let you down. I love us.”
West concludes, despite conflicting diagnoses, that bipolar disorder is the cause of his behavior. “I have found comfort in Reddit forums of all places,” he writes. “Different people speaking about manic depressive episodes of a similar nature. I read their stories and realized that I was not alone. It's not just me who ruins their entire life once a year despite taking meds every day and being told by the so-called best doctors in the world that I am not bipolar, but merely experiencing ‘symptoms of autism.'”
He adds, “I'm not asking for sympathy, or a free pass, though I aspire to earn your forgiveness. I write today simply to ask for your patience and understanding as I find my way home.” Read the full ad, which is paid for by Yeezy and co-signed by company CFO Hussein Lalani, below.
Kanye West:
Twenty-five years ago, I was in a car accident that broke my jaw and caused injury to the right frontal lobe of my brain. At the time, the focus was on the visible damage—the fracture, the swelling, and the immediate physical trauma. The deeper injury, the one inside my skull, went unnoticed.
Comprehensive scans were not done, neurological exams were limited, and the possibility of a frontal-lobe injury was never raised. It wasn't properly diagnosed until 2023. That medical oversight caused serious damage to my mental health and led to my bipolar type-1 diagnosis.
Bipolar disorder comes with its own defense system. Denial. When you're manic, you don't think you're sick. You think everyone else is overreacting. You feel like you're seeing the world more clearly than ever, when in reality you're losing your grip entirely.
Once people label you as ‘crazy,' you feel as if you cannot contribute anything meaningful to the world. It's easy for people to joke and laugh it off when in fact this is a very serious debilitating disease you can die from. According to the World Health Organization and Cambridge University, people with bipolar disorder have a life expectancy that is shortened by ten to fifteen years on average, and a 2x–3x higher all-cause mortality rate than the general population. This is on par with severe heart disease, type-1 diabetes, HIV, and cancer—all lethal and fatal if left untreated.
The scariest thing about this disorder is how persuasive it is when it tells you: You don't need help. It makes you blind, but convinced you have insight. You feel powerful, certain, and unstoppable.
I lost touch with reality. Things got worse the longer I ignored the problem. I said and did things I deeply regret. Some of the people I love the most, I treated the worst. You endured fear, confusion, humiliation, and the exhaustion of trying to love someone who was, at times, unrecognizable. Looking back, I became detached from my true self.
In that fractured state, I gravitated toward the most destructive symbol I could find, the swastika, and even sold t-shirts bearing it. One of the difficult aspects of having bipolar type-1 are the disconnected moments – many of which I still cannot recall—that lead to poor judgment and reckless behavior that oftentimes feels like an out-of-body experience. I regret and am deeply mortified by my actions in that state, and am committed to accountability, treatment, and meaningful change. It does not excuse what I did, though. I am not a Nazi or an antisemite. I love Jewish people.
To the black community—which held me down through all of the highs and lows and the darkest of times. The black community is, unquestionably, the foundation of who I am. I am so sorry to have let you down. I love us.
In early 2025, I fell into a four-month long manic episode of psychotic, paranoid and impulsive behavior that destroyed my life. As the situation became increasingly unsustainable, there were times I didn't want to be here anymore.
Having bipolar disorder is not a state of constant mental illness. When you go into the manic episode, you are ill at that point. When you are not in an episode, you are completely ‘normal.' And that's when the wreckage from the illness hits the hardest. Hitting rock bottom a few months ago, my wife encouraged me to finally get help.
I have found comfort in Reddit forums of all places. Different people speak of being in manic depressive episodes of a similar nature. I read their stories and realized that I was not alone. It's not just me who ruins their entire life once a year despite taking meds every day and being told by the so-called best doctors in the world that I am not bipolar, but merely experiencing “symptoms of autism.”
My words as a leader in my community have real global impact and influence. In my mania, I lost complete sight of that.
As I find my new baseline and new center through an effective regime of medication, therapy, exercise and clean living, I have newfound, much-needed clarity. I am pouring my energy into positive, meaningful art: music, clothing, design, and other new ideas to help the world.
I'm not asking for sympathy, or a free pass, though I aspire to earn your forgiveness. I write today simply to ask for your patience and understanding as I find my way home.
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[Editor's note: This interview contains spoilers for “The Housemaid.”]
One of the most delightful surprises of the holiday movie season last year was director Paul Feig‘s “The Housemaid,” a thrill ride based on the novel by Freida McFadden about a housekeeper (Sydney Sweeney) who gets more than she bargained for when she takes a live-in job with a dysfunctional wealthy couple (Amanda Seyfried and Brandon Sklenar). Feig has long expressed admiration for Alfred Hitchcock's work, and in screenwriter Rebecca Sonnenshine's adaptation of McFadden's bestseller, he discovered the perfect vehicle to, as Hitchcock was fond of saying, “play the audience like a piano.”
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“When I first read the script and then the book, I thought, this is so much fun to really make an audience root for everything they should not be rooting for in the first hour and get them really passionate about it,” Feig told IndieWire's Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “And then have the fun of their anger in the second half for being so hoodwinked, and the satisfaction that comes with the retribution.” The fact that “The Housemaid” essentially reboots halfway through, revealing to the audience that the husband we thought was a nice guy is actually the antagonist, is instrumental in its box office success, as many viewers are returning again and again to the movie to experience how it plays differently once one is aware of the twists.
“Obviously every filmmaker hopes to make things that you'll want to watch a few times, but knowing this has that twist, it's really fun to know that we're seeding things in the first half that, if you watch this a second time, you'll interpret in a completely different way,” Feig said, adding that the script's potential for manipulating the audience was a large part of its appeal. “It's funny, when I was in film school at USC back in the 1980s, all the serious film students were very against manipulating the audience. They were down on Spielberg because he was ‘manipulative.' And I was like, ‘Guys, that's what movies are. All we do is manipulate people!”
Indeed, one of the many pleasures of “The Housemaid” is the way Feig and his department heads slyly direct the audience's eye to miss the clues that are often hiding in plain sight; from the use of color and the selection of props and artwork to the subtle performance choices by Sklenar and Seyfried — whose work has to be convincing in two entirely different contexts — every decision in “The Housemaid” is geared toward deceiving the audience without cheating, so that when they discover they've been manipulated they feel giddy and not offended. Figuring out how and when to parcel out the information was a painstaking process.
“I am very slavish to test screenings,” Feig said, noting that he tends to screen his films for audiences as early in the process as possible so he can gauge what's landing and what isn't. “I have 10 weeks [to put together] a director's cut where no one can mess with me. I'll do my first recruited screening at about five weeks, just to say, okay, I think this is working, it's all together now, but I don't want to fall in love with anything.” Feig not only records audio of the crowd reactions but also video via night vision goggles. “I find night vision to be incredibly helpful because you can see if people are watching passively versus when they start sitting forward and looking around at each other.”
The pacing of “The Housemaid” was particularly tricky, because it required a certain amount of patience from both the audience and the filmmakers in the first half — if the groundwork wasn't carefully laid, the shocks and suspense of the second half wouldn't work. “I always say I want to shoot my movie out of a cannon,” Feig said. “But you can't shoot this movie out of a cannon. We tried [with an opening flash-forward to the crime scene], but we found with an audience that it took the fun out of them discovering this world.” Feig looked to “Once Upon a Time in the West” and its meticulously calibrated structure.
“That movie's brilliant in its slow doling out of information,” Feig said. “It's the best way to do a movie where you're trying to pull people along.” If Leone was an inspiration in terms of pace, Hitchcock remained the big influence in terms of tone. “What I love about Hitchcock is he always lets you have fun. I've watched so many thrillers in my life that take themselves so seriously that I don't feel there's room for fun. I'm very religious about the thriller genre, but how can I bring [laughs] into that genre and get the double response out of the audience? We're treating the story seriously, but there's something wonderfully absurd about this dangerous situation.”
In spite of Feig's reverence for Hitchcock, he says he doesn't follow the master of suspense's model of rigid planning. “ I leave myself very open,” Feig said. “When I started my career, I obviously loved Hitchcock, and he storyboarded every shot, didn't shoot any more frames than he needed so he could control the edit. I tried to do that, but you get to the set, and people have ideas, and you're slapping their ideas down because it takes you off your plan. And I realized early on that I was cutting off all the creativity from my cast.”
Feig changed his approach when he worked on the TV show “Arrested Development” and was forced to fly by the seat of his pants. “They would get you the scripts so late,” he said. “Sometimes you'd just show up in the morning and get the scenes. But it was the greatest thing because it got me out of my head to work with the actors.” Feig typically comes in with an idea of how to shoot the scene, but leaves himself open to new possibilities suggested by the performances. “I've got all these versions of the line or scene, so that when I get to the editing room, I can figure out, ‘Were they right or was I right?' I want that input from the cast.”
Input from his collaborators also led Feig to one of the best needle drops in “The Housemaid,” for Amanda Seyfried's dance of liberation to Kelly Clarkson's “Since You Been Gone.” Initially, Feig used Bob Seger's “Old Time Rock and Roll” as an homage to “Risky Business,” but when he screened the film, the cue didn't work. “I realized, okay, I'm an old guy,” Feig said. “No one in the young audience gives a shit about that.” Feig polled the women who worked on the movie to ask what they would put on to celebrate breaking up with somebody or getting out of a toxic relationship, and the Kelly Clarkson song won in a landslide.
Relying not only on test audiences but his cast and crew is central to Feig's filmmaking philosophy. “I'm very democratic when it comes to this stuff, because I'm making commercial movies,” he said. “I have things I'll fight for, but at the end of the day, if the audience doesn't respond to it, or if women don't respond to it — because I make very female-centric movies — I'm not going to be the guy saying, ‘You're wrong.' I want to be in service to them so they have the best experience they can.”
“The Housemaid” is currently in theaters. To hear the entire conversation with Paul Feig and make sure you don't miss a single episode of Filmmaker Toolkit, subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
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By Ted Johnson
Political Editor
As his administration struggles to deal with the fallout from the latest Minneapolis shooting, Donald Trump has gone back to raging about polls.
Even before a federal agent shot and killed Alex Pretti, Trump's support on one of his key issues, immigration, was falling and in negative territory in a number of surveys.
Trump posted on Truth Social, “Fake and Fraudulent Polling should be, virtually, a criminal offense. As an example, all of the Anti Trump Media that covered me during the 2020 Election showed Polls that were knowingly wrong. They knew what they were doing, trying to influence the Election, but I won in a Landslide, including winning the Popular Vote, all 7 of the 7 Swing States, the Electoral College was a route, and 2,750 Counties to 525. You can't do much better than that, and yet if people examined The Failing New York Times, ABC Fake News, NBC Fake News, CBS Fake News, Low Ratings CNN, or the now defunct MSDNC, Polls were all fraudulent, and bore nothing even close to the final results.”
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Trump appeared to be referencing not the 2020 election, which he lost, but the 2024 election. In the latter, many polls showed the race very close, and within the margin of error, up until the end. Some post-election analyses showed that pollsters underestimated support for Trump, but not by much.
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The final Real Clear Politics average was 48.7% for Harris and 48.6% for Trump, per an NBC News analysis. The final result was 49.8% for Trump and 48.3% for Harris. The most contested swing states — Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan — also were tight and well within the margin of error, per NBC News.
Trump added, “Something has to be done about Fraudulent Polling. Even the Polls of FoxNews and The Wall Street Journal have been, over the years, terrible! There are great Pollsters that called the Election right, but the Media does not want to use them in any way, shape, or form. Isn't it sad what has happened to American Journalism, but I am going to do everything possible to keep this Polling SCAM from moving forward!”
News polling is protected by the First Amendment, but Trump has sought to litigate those who were off. He sued pollster Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register over a 2024 pre-election poll showing him behind in Iowa, yet he went on to win the state. His lawsuit cited an Iowa consumer law, and his state litigation is pending.
Last week, following a poor New York Times/Siena Poll, Trump said he would sue the publication, adding a claim to a defamation lawsuit he filed last year. The poll showed that 49% of those surveyed said that the country was worse off under Trump, versus 32% who said better.
Charlie Stadtlander, a spokesman for the Times, said in a statement last week, “President Trump likes polls that appear favorable to him and dislikes polls that do not. But whether a poll is good or bad for the president has no bearing on our methodology. We aim to produce the most reliable survey of public opinion possible, and our polls have been widely cited for their rigor.”
Pretti was killed on Saturday by one or more federal agents. The Trump administration claimed that the 37-year-old nurse “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” But bystander videos quickly disputed that claim. Even though Pretti was carrying a firearm, analyses from CNN, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post concluded that an officer took what appeared to be Pretti's gun from him before he was shot.
The shooting of Pretti has led to national outrage, with Democrats vowing to withhold votes on Department of Homeland Security funding and conservative voices, like The Wall Street Journal editorial page, calling for a pause in ICE operations.
Earlier on Monday, Trump announced a move that has led to speculation of a shake up among those leading his immigration crackdown. He said that he would be sending his border czar, Tom Homan, to Minnesota, calling him “tough but fair.” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Homan would be managing ICE operations on the ground, a move that seemingly undercuts the role of Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
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This Clown is totally delusional that he keeps saying the same old bullshit like we as we Americans is in the Joke With Him That If He Continues Saying The 2020 Election Was Rigged and Stolen From Him That He Can Make Us As Stupid as He Is,Man Lock Yourself Up and Throw Away The Key and I Mean at An Insane Asylum Because You Are TRULY PATHETIC AND TOTALLY INSANE
Filling his coffers and we are all just sitting by and letting it happen.
Learn to take criticism like a man for once, you spoiled brat.
Ah, yes. A president that doesn't work for you or give a crap about you. Great choice, again!
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By Jake Kanter
International Investigations Editor
Kanye West, now known as Ye, has taken out an ad in The Wall Street Journal to plead for forgiveness after his antisemitic rampage in 2025.
In a 750-word statement headlined ‘To Those I've Hurt,' the “Gold Digger” rapper apologized to the Jewish and Black community for his behavior last year.
Ye, who published the apology as he prepares to release new music, said he suffered a “four-month-long manic episode of psychotic, paranoid and impulsive behavior that destroyed my life.”
During this period, Ye sold $20 shirts with swastikas and used X/Twitter to post a series of antisemitic posts, including declaring himself to be a Nazi.
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“I LOVE HITLER NOW WHAT BITCHES,” he wrote in one all-caps missive, an escalation of a previous outburst against Jewish people in 2022, for which he also apologized.
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The 2025 comments prompted an outpouring of condemnation from critics, including Piers Morgan and David Schwimmer, who said Ye was spewing “sick hate speech.” He deactivated his X account last February.
In his WSJ apology, Ye claimed that he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2023 after undergoing “comprehensive scans” following a car accident in 2002, during which he broke his jaw.
Ye said he lived in denial of his diagnosis and “lost touch with reality.” He continued: “Things got worse the longer I ignored the problem. I said and did things I deeply regret. Some of the people I love the most, I treated the worst.”
Ye, fka Kanye West, takes out a full-page in the Wall Street Journal to apologize to the Black community, and for antisemitism: “I lost touch with reality”
Ye added: “I regret and am deeply mortified by my actions in that state, and am committed to accountability, treatment, and meaningful change. It does not excuse what I did though. I am not a Nazi or an antisemite. I love Jewish people.
“To the black community – which held me down through all of the highs and lows and the darkest of times. The black community is, unquestionably, the foundation of who I am. I am so sorry to have let you down. I love us.”
Ye said his mental health had improved recently. “As I find my new baseline and new center through an effective regime of medication, therapy, exercise, and clean living, I have newfound, much-needed clarity. I am pouring my energy into positive, meaningful art,” he said.
“I'm not asking for sympathy, or a free pass, though I aspire to earn your forgiveness.”
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Don't apologize. They won't accept it anyway.
W Ye
Who was the last public figure of any mainstream repute prior to Ye who sold Nazi merchandise? Some punk rocker, maybe? Not sure an apology is going to fully cut it.
so it's an apology, but it's not his fault, it's a disease. Ok. And his deranged fascist behavior started years before 2025… so I don't buy it!
I know people with bipolar disorder. It doesn't make you sell Nazi merch.
Now, please take out an ad and apologize to people with bipolar disorder.
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When does she sleep?!
On the heels of her “SNL” hosting debut, Teyana Taylor jetted off to Paris Fashion Week, where she popped up in the front row at Monday's Schiaparelli Haute Couture show at the Petit Palais.
And while other notables in attendance (like Demi Moore, Lauren Sánchez and Jodie Turner-Smith) were attired in suiting separates and gowns, the Oscar nominee turned heads in a completely transparent (and unlined) black Chantilly lace top and matching pencil skirt, a black tuxedo coat draped over her shoulders.
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The “One Battle After Another” actress completed the daring look with black platform pumps, a silver chandelier brooch with a rhinestone knot and — the pièce de résistance — an antique silver crown encrusted with rhinestones and pearls that asserted her fashion dominance.
In a cheeky twist, both pieces were re-creations of jewelry stolen from the Louvre Museum last October, per Vanity Fair.
Taylor's turned to Schiaparelli for some of her most memorable red carpet moments, recently gracing the Golden Globes in a sculptural black halter gown finished with a racy diamanté thong.
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“The crack is covered in diamonds. It's expensive!” the 35-year-old quipped on the step-and-repeat.
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At the Paris premiere of “All's Fair” in October, Taylor stole the show in a gold metallic mesh gown that hugged her every curve.
That same month, she attended a Desert Diamonds bash in a surrealist leather Schiaparelli coat embossed to look like crocodile hide.
And for the Disney Upfront in May, Taylor dazzed in a denim set adorned with the fashion house's signature gold bijoux buttons shaped like eyes, ears and lips.
With awards season just kicking off, it's a sure bet we'll spot the style star in more headling-making Schiaparelli styles in the months ahead.
Zach Braff is opening up about how the upcoming “Scrubs” revival is honoring the late Sam Lloyd while bringing fans back to Sacred Heart Hospital.
In a new interview with Esquire, Braff revealed that the ABC revival includes a meaningful tribute to Lloyd, who portrayed Ted Buckland for nine seasons on the original series.
“There's a new bar that we all go to, and we named it Lloyd's Tavern,” Braff shared. “That was the production designer's idea, which I thought was beautiful. So there's a nod to Sam.”
Braff added that the cast is also planning a dedicated tribute episode.
“We love Sam; we miss him. It's hard to do this show without him,” he said. “And our plan is to most definitely have an episode that is a tribute to him.”
Braff explained that it's still unclear whether that tribute will appear in the first revival season, which consists of nine episodes, or be saved for a potential second season.
Lloyd died in 2020 due to complications from lung cancer. He was 56.
Braff returns as J.D., alongside Donald Faison as Dr. Christopher Turk and Sarah Chalke as Dr. Elliot Reid as series regulars. Judy Reyes reprises her role as Nurse Carla Espinosa, while John C. McGinley returns as Dr. Perry Cox in a recurring capacity.
Robert Maschio appears as The Todd, and Phill Lewis guest stars as Hooch.
Two longtime fan favorites — Neil Flynn's Janitor and Ken Jenkins' Dr. Bob Kelso — are not currently confirmed for the revival's initial nine-episode order. Braff explained that their absence is tied to story logistics and timing, not interest.
“The true answer is, if we're blessed to have a second season, absolutely,” Braff said. “They're both interested in doing it. But do we have the bandwidth in the first nine episodes to get to it all and service a story that would be worthy of Ken and Neil?”
The ABC revival also introduces a new group of Sacred Heart staff and interns.
Vanessa Bayer joins as Sibby, who runs a wellness program for hospital faculty and staff, while Joel Kim Booster plays attending physician Dr. Eric Park.
The incoming intern class includes Ava Bunn as Serena, Jacob Dudman as Asher, David Gridley as Blake, Layla Mohammadi as Amara, and Amanda Morrow as Dashana. Additional recurring roles include Michael James Scott as co-charge nurse, Francois Dubois, and X Mayo as co-charge nurse, Pippa Raymond.
Series creator Bill Lawrence previously told TVLine the revival aims to reflect both the humor of the original series and the realities of modern medicine.
“If I saw two guys in their late 40s or early 50s doing ‘World's Most Giant Doctor,' I'd go, ‘What the (expletive) is going on?'” Lawrence said. “To see what that friendship looks like at their age, and take a comedic look at what medicine has become since those kids started out as interns — that's the goal.”
ABC's official logline reads: “J.D. and Turk scrub in together for the first time in a long time. Medicine has changed, interns have changed, but their bromance has stood the test of time.”
“Scrubs” premieres Wednesday, February 25, at 8 p.m. ET with back-to-back episodes on ABC. Episodes stream next day on Hulu.
Can't wait!! Love this show.
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By
Jon Blistein
Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, apologized for his years of antisemitic and other controversial comments in a full-page advertisement in The Wall Street Journal.
In the lengthy note, titled “To Those I've Hurt” (and paid for by Yeezy), West issued his apology alongside a discussion of his battle with bipolar disorder. Noting that he was not properly diagnosed until 2023, West linked his mental health struggles to undiagnosed and unexamined head trauma he might've suffered in the 2002 car crash that shattered his jaw (and inspired his debut solo hit, “Through the Wire”).
“I lost touch with reality. Things got worse the longer I ignored the problem,” West wrote of his recent manic episodes. “I said and did things I deeply regret. Some of the people I love the most, I treated the worst. You endured fear, confusion, humiliation, and the exhaustion of trying to love someone who was, at times, unrecognizable. Looking back, I became detached from my true self.”
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Describing what it's like to be in a manic episode, West said, “You don't think you're sick,” and it feels like “everyone else is overreacting. You feel like you're seeing the world more clearly than ever, when in reality you're losing your grip entirely. Once people label you as ‘crazy,' you feel as if you cannot contribute anything meaningful to the world.”
He added, “The scariest thing about this disorder is how persuasive it is when it tells you: You don't need help. It makes you blind, but convinced you have insight. You feel powerful, certain, and unstoppable.”
West went on to admit that in this “fractured state I gravitated toward the most destructive symbol I could find, the swastika, and even sold T-shirts bearing it.” (West started selling the swastika merch on his website last February, while a few months later he released a song called “Heil Hitler.” But even before that, there had been other public incidents involving praise for Adolf Hitler and the promotion of Nazi iconography, along with numerous antisemitic outbursts. Rolling Stone has also reported that West's fascination with Hitler and Nazis goes back several decades.)
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In his apology, West continued: “One of the difficult aspects of having biopolar type-1 are the disconnected moments — many of which I still cannot recall — that lead to poor judgment and reckless behavior that oftentimes feels like an out-of-body experience. I regret and am deeply mortified by my actions in that state, and am committed to accountability, treatment, and meaningful change. It does not excuse what I did, though. I am not a Nazi or an antisemite. I love Jewish people.”
West also apologized to the Black community, which he said “held me down through all of the highs and lows and the darkest of times. The black community is, unquestionably, the foundation of who I am. I am so sorry to have let you down. I love us.”
According to West, the four-month “manic episode of psychotic, paranoid, and impulsive behavior” he endured early last year nearly “destroyed my life.” He even appeared to admit to some apparent suicidal ideation, saying, “As the situation became increasingly unsustainable, there were times I didn't want to be here anymore.” He credited his wife, Bianca Censori, with encouraging him to finally get help after he finally hit “rock bottom a few months ago.”
West said he has been searching for a “new baseline and new center through an effective regime of medication, therapy, exercise and clean living.” He also said he has found comfort in Reddit forums, where people share their own experiences of “being in manic or depressive episodes of a similar nature.” West said, “I read their stories and realized that I was not alone.”
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In closing out his apology, West said he has found some “much-needed clarity” and is putting his “energy into positive, meaningful art: music, clothing, design, and other new ideas to help the world.” He concluded: “I'm not asking for sympathy, or a free pass, though I aspire to earn your forgiveness. I write today simply to ask for you patience and understanding as I find my way home.”
This is not the first time West has apologized for his behavior and offensive comments. In December 2023, after several years' worth of antisemitic comments, he published a note on Instagram, written in Hebrew, that read, “I sincerely apologize to the Jewish community for any unintended outbursts, caused by my words or actions. It was not my intention to hurt or demean, and I deeply regret any pain I may have caused.”
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By Destiny Jackson
Awards Writer
It's time to dust off our trusty pistols and break out the leather jacket because we're finally headed to bingo. OK, not exactly bingo, but instead the iconic locale of Raccoon City. Not seen since 1999's Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (or technically Resident Evil 3's 2020 remake), the latest game in the Resident Evil franchise, Resident Evil Requiem, is returning to its beloved roots.
Taking place about 30 years after the missile strike on Raccoon City, Resident Evil Requiem centers on FBI analyst Grace Ashcroft, the daughter of Resident Evil Outbreak protagonist Alyssa Ashcroft, who is still haunted by the mysterious death of her mother some eight years prior. When she is thrown into an investigation of ritualistic murders connected to her mother's past in Raccoon City, she catches the decrepit eye of a former Umbrella scientist named Dr. Victor Gideon, who claims she holds the key to unlocking a secret project that is probably super darksided. Since there's still a month to go until the game's release, we don't know all the details just yet, but somewhere along the way of Grace's investigation, she crosses paths with fan favorite and resident badass, RPD's Leon Kennedy.
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After checking out a preview, Deadline spoke to director Kōshi Nakanishi and producer Masato Kumazawa about what fans can expect from what is sure to be Capcom's next horror smash-hit.
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DEADLINE: It's been three decades. How does the team keep current on what's scary? What inspirations are you pulling from when making a Resident Evil game?
KŌSHI NAKANISHI: That is a challenge that the developers have when they are doing an entry in the series. The easiest way to find out [if we succeeded] is to have people play it. How did you find the preview?
DEADLINE: I was overwhelmed with scares. There was a scene where I had three different paths to go down: one led to a kitchen with a big, scary chef, the other led to a dining room full of zombies eating people, and another, which I thought would be safe, contained a maid in the bathroom ready to attack me. I didn't want to go anywhere.
NAKANISHI: [Laughs.] That's exactly what we aimed for. I'm very happy to hear that. What you felt, that fear, even to the point where you are kind of scared to go forward or proceed, that's key to providing fear. It's about not knowing what's going to happen or what's around each corner. Is your death waiting around the corner? You don't know until you find out. Fear is a seed in your own imagination. So, the key to providing a scary experience in any of these titles is to give the player enough to let their imagination go and basically create fear.
DEADLINE: Resident Evil Requiem has a split-narrative style like Resident Evil: Revelations. What have you learned between making the two games?
NAKANISHI: There is some similarity between the two games, but I want to be clear that I did not purposefully set out to make Requiem a split story just because Revelations was a split story. But yes, there's similarities in terms of differences in gameplay, surroundings, characters [you interact with], circumstances and so on. When you played the preview, you started out as Leon, and he's got a lot of firearms, choices and combat options. He's a very strong character. Once you go from him to Grace, it's a very big shift. You go from playing a powerful character to Grace, who is more modest in her options, which should give you this feeling of, “Oh my goodness, how am I going to be going through all of this [horror], will I be OK?” This is like my previous answer about the key to fear really being all about players' imaginations. And this [storytelling device] is just another way that we feel stoked that.
DEADLINE: Was it ever just going to be Grace alone? When did Leon come into the picture?
NAKANISHI: During early prototyping, there were times when we thought about Leon as the single main character or just having Grace as the single character. It was just a lot of trial and error that let us do both.
DEADLINE: How would you describe Leon and Grace to the audience?
NAKANISHI: Grace is a young woman who, eight years earlier, lost her mother. And that's still traumatic for her, and she hasn't fully processed that trauma, so it still affects her to the [game's] present day. She's much more on the inexperienced side of things, whereas, of course, Leon has been fighting biohazards for close to 30 years at this point. Obviously, he has a lot of mental and physical strength and resilience. But at the same time, since he has been doing this for so long, he's seen a lot of tragedy, and that weighs on him, which is something that is expressed in Requiem. They're very contrasting characters. However, through Requiem, Leon's journey leads him back to Raccoon City, and Grace is also there. So, with that combination, we've got some legacy and newer characters both being tied back to Raccoon City, and that's one of the overall themes and concepts that is expressed throughout Requiem.
DEADLINE: In the preview, it was mentioned that Leon has something called the Umbrella curse. What more can you say about that?
NAKANISHI: This game's setting takes place 30 years after the Raccoon City incident, which was connected to Umbrella. So, this phrase about the “Umbrella curse” refers to something that has affected people who were either enveloped by the incident or present when that situation happened. But that's about all I can say for now. [Laughs.]
DEADLINE: Producer Kumazawa, what were some non-negotiables that you had to have in this game to get the themes across?
NAKANISHI: I'll add that it was vital to [show the effects] of the Raccoon City incident and how it's affected many people over and over again for close to 30 years in the game. Presenting that in the game is one of the key aspects of communicating the concept and themes of Requiem across the series.
MASATO KUMAZAWA: This was touched on a bit earlier, but it was depicting the contrast [that was important for us]. You have such different characters at different points in their lives between Grace and Leon, which allows the player to experience varied gameplay. And, of course, with storytelling, this is about two different people finding a common journey that leads them both to Raccoon City. Tying all of that together is the core of the themes in Requiem.
DEADLINE: What are you most excited for people to experience with this game?
NAKANISHI: There are two styles that are presented here between Grace and Leon. They are both styles that have been in Resident Evil games in the past. However, this is the first time we've combined our gameplay styles in a way that provides tension and release when switching narratives. So, it's very unique to Requiem. So, I'm most excited to see how users experience that when they play the game.
DEADLINE: I must ask. In the preview, Leon is talking to someone on a headset. And I need to know. Is it Claire or Ada? Where are they?
NAKANISHI: [Laughs.] So, I know a lot of fans are interested in similar things. We all want to know. I am also very interested in the private relationship between Leon and Ada. However, I can't comment on either one of these things. But I will say that we have put a lot of work into Requiem, implementing stories and things that fans will love and enjoy. So, I hope the fans are looking forward to the game.
Resident Evil Requiem will release February, 27 on PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch 2, Windows and Xbox Series X/S
[This interview, conducted through an interpreter, has been edited for length and clarity]
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In 2014, David Wain introduced a new cinematic technique that was arguably the biggest contribution to the art of moving images since the advent of Technicolor. With the release of his New York-set rom-com “They Came Together,” he proved that a city doesn't just have to serve as a film's setting — it can actually be a character in the movie. Breaking down such a layered metaphysical concept with the relatively few words left in this review would be a fool's errand, but suffice it to say that all of the math miraculously checks out.
Wain has spent the subsequent decade coasting off the success of that breakthrough, but it's hard to blame him — nobody can be expected to stumble upon that level of innovation twice in a lifetime. But his latest masterpiece, “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass,” proves that his cinematic gambit applies to more than just the Big Apple. The conceptual genius has found a way to turn Los Angeles into a movie character too!
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“Gail Daughtry” is a love letter to Los Angeles, just without any of the city's good parts. It's a tribute to chain restaurants and star maps and grifters who ply Old Hollywood jargon at the unsuspecting tourists who don't realize they're missing all the great culture that the city currently has to offer by pursuing what they erroneously believe it once had. It's all shown through the eyes of Gail (Zoey Deutsch), a clueless midwesterner who shows up in the City of Angels for a hairstyling convention only to find herself questioning everything she once took for granted after a few chance encounters with a CAA assistant, a disgraced paparazzo, and a former “Mad Men” star with a lot of time on his hands.
But that's getting ahead of ourselves. When we meet Gail, she's perfectly content with her small Kansas life. She's very excited about marrying her fiancé in two weeks, so when the topic of a celebrity “hall pass” comes up, she doesn't even know how to answer the question. Her fiancé is quick to reveal that he would use his sex pass on Tilda Swinton (before changing his answer to Jennifer Aniston), but she can't even come up with a single celebrity fantasy when she's pressured about it. It's he who has to remind her that she once masturbated to Jon Hamm when she was 16 years old, so she reluctantly decides to use Don Draper as her pass — still assuming that this is just a harmless thought exercise.
But when her fiancé does fuck the real Jennifer Aniston — after meeting her in a hilarious context that will remain unspoiled here — Gail's life is thrust into crisis. With less than two weeks before she's set to be married, she accompanies her gay best friend Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley) to L.A. for a weekend to take her mind off things. Naturally, they determine that the only way to avenge the injustice is for her to have sex with Jon Hamm to even the score. The two clueless tourists embark on a mission to find him that blatantly mirrors “The Wizard of Oz,” picking up a coterie of misfits along the way who help them out of the kindness of their hearts (and the occasional ulterior motive).
The film overflows with celebrity cameos of both the explainable and absurd variety, but it's all in service of a greater vision. From a Second Amendment-loving Weird Al Yankovic to yet another “Shark Tank” investor trying their hand at big screen acting, “Gail Daughtry” is a film that's best watched with a face sheet. All of them are funny, but nobody tops John Slattery, who gives a hysterically self-deprecating performance as a fictional version of his post-“Mad Men” self. Unemployed and brimming with confidence that crumbles at the slightest provocation, the self-proclaimed “Slat Man” is desperate to get back into Hamm's good graces. He sells Gail on his proximity to his former co-star, only for her to find out that their current relationship consists of little more than unanswered text messages. He becomes one more addition to their traveling party, and he remains the straw that stirs the drink for the remainder of the film.
The plot takes quite a few wild digressions on our heroes' way to meeting Hamm (who also gives an excellent performance as himself). But anyone familiar with Wain and Marino's work should know that all of this plot summary is worth little more than the digital paper that it's not actually printed on. Much like “Wet Hot American Summer” and “They Came Together,” “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass” is best understood as a basket of jokes and non sequiturs that simply need some kind of framework to keep things semi-coherent. That's a compliment, of course, as these are very, very funny jokes. Wain and Marino have turned the dumb punchline into a precise science, alternating between wholesomeness and vulgarity with such mastery that you'll barely have time to catch your breath before you're ready to start laughing again.
The old cliche that writing about a great film is like dancing about architecture has some truth to it, and this writer is well aware that nothing he could put down into words will be as funny as watching the damn thing. But 25 years after “Wet Hot American Summer” premiered at Sundance, it's a relief to know that Wain and Marino are still at the absolute top of their game. Here's hoping we get 25 more years of movies from them — by then, the world might be ready for “Gail Daughtry: Ten Years Later.”
“Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass” premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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By
Simon Vozick-Levinson
Abbey Road Studios was buzzing with activity last fall. Longtime record executive Rich Clarke remembers the scene in the London studio's cafeteria in late November 2025: “You look up and you've got [Fontaines D.C.'s] Grian Chatten having a talk with [the Libertines'] Carl Barât by the door,” he says. “You've got Damon Albarn sat with Jonathan Glazer on one table. And then suddenly all of Pulp walk in and they're in a queue to get their lasagna.”
Those luminaries were all there to work on HELP(2), a compilation album supporting the charity organization War Child UK, where Clarke serves as head of music. Out March 6, it's a majorly star-studded affair, with new songs and covers by Olivia Rodrigo, Cameron Winter, Wet Leg, Sampha, Arlo Parks, Depeche Mode, Big Thief, and many others. The first single from the album, “Opening Night,” is also the first new song that Arctic Monkeys have released since 2022: a perfectly louche anthem-in-waiting with an instant-classic lead vocal from Alex Turner.
Founded in the early Nineties by a pair of filmmakers who were horrified by the violence of the Bosnian Civil War, War Child provides services to children who are affected by global conflict — meaning not just the immediate needs of food, water, and shelter, but also longer-term support for mental health and education. The organization has a long history of partnering with musicians, going back to 1995's The Help Album, which boasted new songs from Paul McCartney, Radiohead, Blur, Oasis, Portishead, and more of the biggest names in British music. “That had a huge effect for the charity,” Clarke says. “At that point, they were doing minor things, delivering supplies behind siege lines in Sarajevo. It allowed the organization to scale up, because crucially, it had money to fund activities.”
The idea for a new Help album had been percolating since around Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. “Since that moment, we've seen escalation of violence in the Middle East. We've seen the civil war in Sudan go to probably the largest humanitarian crisis in the world right now — there's 15 million children who are in need of humanitarian assistance in Sudan,” Clarke says. “There's been a real feeling from the artist community of wanting to do something.”
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The project gained speed in late 2024, when producer James Ford came on board, followed quickly by Arctic Monkeys, with whom he's worked closely for many years. “Anything James touches turns to gold,” drummer Matt Helders tells Rolling Stone. “If he's putting something together, we know it's going to be for the right reasons, and also be a good-quality thing, as well.”
Arctic Monkeys have their own relationship with War Child going back to 2018, when they played a show at the Royal Albert Hall and donated the proceeds to the organization. A live album from that concert, released two years later, yielded even more funds for children affected by war. “I think we're just shy of £1.5 million from the show and the record,” Clarke says.
When the band met up at Abbey Road toward the end of 2025, it was their first time together in a studio in a few years. They decided to revisit an unfinished song that Turner had been toying with for more than a decade; Helders estimates that it first surfaced “in Joshua Tree, when we used to record out there.” (Dedicated Monkeys scholars can deduce that it probably entered the picture during the sessions for 2009's Humbug or 2013's AM, both partially recorded in the California desert.)
“He never got to scratch the itch of completing this song,” Helders says. “It was just one of those that wouldn't go away in his head, I think. There was never a full version of it. We'd jam it out and try to write parts for it. It never got over the finish line, but it was too good to just leave alone.”
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Now, they tried taking another run at “Opening Night” in the style they've evolved into on later albums like Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino and The Car. “And it just worked,” Helders says. “It's different to what it was going to be if we did it 10, 15 years ago, but we were all really happy with it… It's almost like this song was waiting until we were good enough to do it.”
The rest of the HELP(2) sessions, the bulk of which took place over three days at Abbey Road, featured some other familiar faces, too. Back in 1996, when Pulp won the Mercury Prize for their era-defining album Different Class, they donated their winnings to War Child, feeling that The Help Album ought to have won instead. Three decades later, Jarvis Cocker and company stepped up to contribute a characteristically droll rocker called “Begging for Change” to the new project.
The original Help album, released at the height of the Britpop craze, included an instrumental track from Blur. This time, Blur guitarist Graham Coxon dropped by Abbey Road to sit in with the indie band English Teacher, while Albarn teamed up with Chatten and rapper Kae Tempest to polish off a new song called “Flags.”
“It was quite major chords, which is unusual for me,” the Blur/Gorillaz singer tells Rolling Stone. “So when conversation of War Child came, I thought it was quite a good thing to present as an idea.”
Albarn is a fan of both Chatten and Tempest, calling them both “huge talents,” and he was delighted to form an impromptu trio with them in the studio. “Flags” wound up featuring guitar from Johnny Marr, Portishead's Adrian Utley, and Dave Okumu, as well as backing vocals from Cocker, Barât, Declan McKenna, Marika Hackman, the members of Black Country, New Road, and several other musicians who were around that day.
“We did it all together, like a band,” Albarn says. “When you do music for charity, it can be a bit trite somehow. But I don't think we got distracted by that sense of, ‘Oh, we're doing a charity record.' We all just enjoyed recording together in Abbey Road.”
All of this action was recorded on hand-held cameras wielded by a crew of grade-schoolers that Glazer, the filmmaker behind The Zone of Interest and Under the Skin, sent to Abbey Road to document the sessions. “It's to tell the story through the eyes of children,” Clarke says. “At one point, they'd be sat next to Damon on the piano stool, or sticking a camera up Jarvis' nose in the vocal booth in Studio Three. It had a wonderful effect on the atmosphere, because once you've got kids running around, it just takes the stress away.”
Sadly, Ford, who was diagnosed with leukemia in early 2025, was unable to attend the sessions in person. So War Child brought in top producers including Marta Salogni and Catherine Marks to help out, and Ford continued to provide as much remote input as possible.
On the final day of recording, Dec. 17, Olivia Rodrigo came by Abbey Road to record a quietly stunning cover of the Magnetic Fields' “The Book of Love”; the track also features Coxon on acoustic guitar. Ford, who was receiving treatment in the hospital at the time, guided the session over Zoom. “He was actually talking into Olivia Rodrigo's [headphones] while she was recording, while he was having a blood transfusion,” Clarke says. “Remarkable man, and an absolute genius.”
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Around Christmas, Clarke got to hear Arctic Monkeys' “Opening Night” for the first time. A longtime fan of the band — “I'm old enough to remember seeing them in Camden in skinny jeans and a flannel shirt and long hair” — he knows that getting a new single from them is no small feat. “We didn't take it for granted,” he says. “I was absolutely blown away. It's a brilliant track, isn't it?”
With “Opening Night” out now and the album arriving on streaming services soon, he's looking forward to seeing how fans respond to all the music that got made at Abbey Road for War Child. “The wonderful thing is, these rights are going to support children affected by conflict in perpetuity,” Clarke says. “The music's the legacy piece, and the quality of that will carry through for the next 30 years, we hope. Fingers crossed.”
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By
Sean Woods
We are being told by the Trump administration that an intensive care nurse, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, and a mom of three, Renee Nicole Good, both gunned down by ICE agents in Minnesota, are a new breed of homegrown terrorist. You can see video of both incidents and judge for yourself the grotesque absurdity of these claims. Or you could take the word of the resident Renfield of the White House, Stephen Miller, who took to social media and called Pretti “a would-be assassin” who “tried to murder federal law enforcement.”
Videos of Pretti's horrific killing, shot from multiple angles, show six or seven agents wrestling a passive Pretti to the ground. When they discover a gun on his body, one of the agents appears to disarm Pretti, and then another shoots him four times in the back. A third agent also fires into his body. Shooting a subdued man in the back is the very definition of excessive force and cowardice.
Despite visual evidence to the contrary, Department of Homeland Security honcho and self-proclaimed dog executioner Kristi Noem claimed the Pretti killing was justified: “This looks like a situation where an individual arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.”
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Border Patrol commandant Gregory Bovino, whose recent wardrobe choices call to mind someone cosplaying as an Indiana Jones villain, claimed Pretti “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” According to the available videos, the only thing Pretti had in his hands during the encounter was a phone. He doesn't seem to fight the ICE agents in any way. Bovino also made the preposterous and offensive comment that the agents were the real victims in the incident. The lies pile up and insult our intelligence.
No matter what the Trump administration may claim, federal agents are not authorized to act as judge, jury, and executioner on the streets of America. These agents are not above the law. But in both of the Minneapolis killings we see behavior that breaks protocol of a police shooting. The agents leave the scene. Local authorities are prevented from examining the evidence of the killing. Elected officials and the White House trade insults and invective but there's no effort from Washington to conduct the kind of rigorous investigation that the death of any human being merits on principle or under the eyes of a nation governed by laws. Partisanship and extreme policy turned into a literal blood sport.
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A more serious and sober president would attempt to diffuse this situation before the gyre widens further and the country is convulsed by more violence and damage. Instead, President Trump took to Truth Social to attack Minnesota Democrats in a particularly unhinged stream of rage. “Where are the local Police? Why weren't they allowed to protect ICE Officers? The Mayor and the Governor called them off? It is stated that many of these Police were not allowed to do their job, that ICE had to protect themselves — Not an easy thing to do! Why does Ilhan Omar have $34 Million Dollars in her account? And where are the Tens of Billions of Dollars that have been stolen from the once Great State of Minnesota? We are there because of massive Monetary Fraud, with Billions of Dollars missing, and Illegal Criminals that were allowed to infiltrate the State through the Democrats' Open Border Policy. We want the money back, and we want it back, NOW.”
What the alleged fraud in Minnesota has to do with ICE killing civilians, other than to distract and deflect, is unclear. This yearlong blitz of insidious distortions from the administration has taken a toll on all of us. There is a fact pattern of mendacity. From DOGE to the Big Beautiful Bill, the gutting of the government workforce, and the weaponization of the Department of Justice to punish political enemies, it's been an exhausting year of ugly theatrics. Unfortunately, a parade of falsehoods has been used to justify violence before. If killing Venezuelans in boats with missiles was about drugs, where are the narcotics — or any evidence at all? The administration asks us to simply trust them.
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Last week, Trump brought his black cloud to Davos to insult our European allies and openly plot to seize a longstanding friendly nation's territory: Greenland. An island where we already have military access to suit our strategic needs. Trump's long and deranged speech, filled with more lies and ugly invective, veered into mad king territory. He called Greenland Iceland four times. The performance was an embarrassment, one only bootlicking true believers in the administration would fail to recognize as the president's brain rot fully exposed. Trump's coarse and venal character has left the world and large swathes of the country horrified, fearful, and rightfully furious. At home and abroad, the president's anger and lies sow chaos, confusion, and revulsion.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney summed up the situation: “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” Carney told the crowd at Davos. “Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy, and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited. You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.”
The carnage needs to stop. Congress has broad powers and must act. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in the wake of Good's killing, “We just saw them murder an American citizen in cold blood in the street. Despite whatever lies the president wants to tell, you can see what happened for yourself.”
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Despite a bipartisan call for an investigation into Pretti's killing, led by Sen. Tina Smith of Minnesota, there are too few signs of courage beyond the usual vocal opposition. Unless a significant number of the GOP majority joins the minority, this outrageous and consistent abuse of power will only get worse. We can't have thousands of federal agents roaming cities, sweeping people off the streets, operating with impunity, clashing with protestors, and not expect more violent episodes and senseless death. Unless ICE is reined in, we are heading for more tragedy and bloodshed across the country.
Americans cannot live within all these lies any longer.
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Kanye West has issued an apology to Black and Jewish communities after years of spewing racist and antisemitic beliefs.
“I lost touch with reality. Things got worse the longer I ignored the problem. I said and did things I deeply regret. Some of the people I love the most, I treated the worst,” he wrote in a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal.
“You endured fear, confusion, humiliation, and the exhaustion of trying to have someone who was, at times, unrecognizable. Looking back, I became detached from my true self,” West, 48, added.
“In that fractured state, I gravitated toward the most destructive symbol I could find, the swastika, and even sold T-shirts bearing it.”
West, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, said his illness prompted him to have “poor judgment and reckless behavior that oftentimes feels like an out-of-body experience.”
“I regret and am deeply mortified by my actions in that state, and am committed to accountability, treatment, and meaningful change,” he penned.
“It does not excuse what I did though. I am not a Nazi or an antisemite. I love Jewish people,” West declared.
The Grammy winner then spoke directly to the Black community, who he claimed “held [him] down through all of the highs and lows and the darkest of times.”
“The black community is, unquestionably, the foundation of who I am. I am so sorry to have let you down. I love us,” West wrote.
“My words as a leader in my community have global impact and influence. In my mania, I lost complete sight of that.”
The rapper said he is not “asking for sympathy, or a free pass,” but he wants to “earn” people's forgiveness.
“I write today simply to ask for your patience and understanding as I find my way home,” he wrote.
West explained in his letter that he wasn't “properly diagnosed” until 2023, more than two decades after he suffered a brain injury in a car crash.
“That medical oversight caused serious damage to my mental health and led to my bipolar type-1 diagnosis,” he wrote.
“The scariest thing about this disorder is how persuasive it is when it tells you: You don't need help. It makes you blind, but convinced you have insight. You feel powerful, certain, unstoppable,” the fashion designer shared.
West has made several controversial statements over the years.
In 2022, the hip-hop hitmaker rocked a “White Lives Matter” T-shirt to a surprise Yeezy fashion show in Paris.
That October, West tweeted that he was going to go “death con 3” on Jewish people. The remark caused several companies to cut ties with the dad of four, including Adidas.
The following year, West wore a black Ku Klux Klan hood to his “Vultures” album listening party.
He also promoted swastika T-shirts in a 2025 Super Bowl ad and released a song titled “Heil Hitler.”
The combined testosterone flowing through Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista, the mega-macho leads of The Wrecking Crew, would be enough to fuel the manosphere's masculinity crisis for decades. The pair put their personae and pectorals to work in the action-comedy, playing beefy bickering half-brothers doling out juvenile jokes and hardcore violence in equal measure, though never skewing far enough in either direction to reach the lovable lunkheadedness of the Fast And Furious films, or the virtuosic brutality of a direct-to-video brawler. Instead, The Wrecking Crew casts about between genres like driftwood caught by the tide; for two hours, the script cycles between family trauma drama, goofy Hawaiian noir, meathead romp, and wham-bang slugfest. The indecision at least showcases some consistency, though, in that each approach is equally dissatisfying.
Directed by Ángel Manuel Soto (Blue Beetle) and written by Jonathan Tropper (showrunner of Momoa and Bautista's See), The Wrecking Crew pitches a familiar idea: Two burly boys of opposing temperament have to team up to solve a crime. Hijinks and a mounting body count ensue. But estranged siblings James (Bautista) and Jonny (Momoa), despite how they're introduced, are effectively the same; a buy-one-get-one-free at the Costco meat department. The Wrecking Crew may initially insist that James is a straightlaced Navy SEAL hardass teaching recruits in Hawaii and that Jonny is a drunken biker cop in Oklahoma, but when their dad is murdered, they reunite to figure out what happened and merge into a single stunted Bad Boy living through two bodies.
From the too-simple set-up of the initial crime—their private eye father, whom neither have spoken to in years, sends Jonny a package right before he's run down by a van in the opening scene—The Wrecking Crew tries to stuff its plot with convolutions and runarounds, the kind of cluttering misdirection and ephemera that's usually handwaved away by the cynical atmosphere and hangdog detectives of noir. Here, Jonny and James are the exact same kind of vanilla badass, bumbling through a mystery clear to everyone but them and where each new character slots easily into a predetermined screenplay type. There's the local cop (Stephen Root), who serves as their surrogate Lethal Weapon captain. There's the shady businessman (Claes Bang with a weebish topknot) and family-friend politician (Temuera Morrison), obviously in cahoots. There's the comic-relief tech nerd (Jacob Batalon, who desperately needs to escape this typecasting) and the brothers' wives/girlfriends (Morena Baccarin and Roimata Fox) who exist to alternately nag and fawn over the leads. Henchmen fodder is supplied by the Yakuza and the Hawaiian mob.
If this looks like a bullet list you scribble down the hour before a big presentation about your Momoa-Bautista team-up movie, that's representative of what it feels like watching The Wrecking Crew. The duo muscle through swaths of story with a tone that is clear only in its aggression, interlacing crime cliches and left-field emotional melodrama with dick-swinging stupidity—a cheese-grater moment out of Evil Dead Rise and a teeth-scattering pseudo-curbstomp are matched by wit like “Fuck you, fat Jackie Chan!” and “Oh look, it's fat John Cena.” It's The Nice Guys if the script got a Spike TV rewrite and the leads had been replaced by two big bags of gas station beef jerky. The butt-rock score from Bobby Krlic is, at least, fitting.
Perhaps the most disappointing part of The Wrecking Crew is that both Momoa and Bautista have worked with and against type to charm before. Tropper's script gestures towards self-awareness, with every other side character commenting on the leads' undeniable dumb-jock aura. And yet, though they have every opportunity to rebel against this—and Bautista, at least, is ostensibly playing a by-the-book military man—they fall into the stereotype without over-embracing it. They're playing stupid, but not stupid enough, and a too-similar kind of stupid to generate any kind of driving friction between them. Their bickering is toothless, and their approaches to investigating Hawaii's underworld mostly involve highly telegraphed punching. Soto's set pieces are similarly underwhelming—scenes of storming a compound and outrunning a helicopter are as derivative as yet another fight scene mimicking the Oldboy hallway.
The Hawaiian setting, dueling-brother premise, and egoless charisma of its leads (both Bautista and Momoa made their superhero characters into enjoyably dense scene-stealers, not to mention their abilities to get silly in kids' movies) offered plenty to set The Wrecking Crew apart, both from its brainless-action contemporaries and its straight-to-streaming star vehicle peers. But outside of some local slang and sandy shooting locations, there's little that's memorable—even the rancid vibes and intangible action aren't especially notable for a two-hander like this. It's rarely the case where a film would actually be improved by leaning into its worst impulses, but if The Wrecking Crew had gone full tank-top cinema, it might have at least felt like its makers were having fun making a mess.
Director: Ángel Manuel Soto
Writer: Jonathan Tropper
Starring: Dave Bautista, Jason Momoa, Claes Bang, Temuera Morrison, Jacob Batalon, Frankie Adams, Miyavi, Stephen Root, Morena Baccarin, Lydia Peckham, Roimata Fox, Branscombe Richmond, Maia Kealoha, Josua Tuivavalagi
Release Date: January 28, 2026 (Amazon)
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Leiomy, will take on the leading role of Macavity, while Ken Ard, who played the role in the 1982 production, will return to the show as a new character.
By
Caitlin Huston
Business Writer
Original Broadway Cats cast member Ken Ard, Legendary's Leoimy and Saturday Church's Bryson Battle are joining the cast of Broadway's Cats: The Jellicle Ball.
Leoimy, a dancer known as the “Wonder Woman of Vogue” and a judge on HBO's voguing reality competition Legendary, will make her Broadway debut as Macavity in the reimagined revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical. Ard, who played Macavity in the 1982 Broadway production of Cats, will return to the stage after 25 years to take on the newly created role of DJ Griddlebone.
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Battle, a finalist on season 28 of The Voice who recently starred as Ulysees in Saturday Church at New York Theatre Workshop, will make his Broadway debut in the role of Jellylorum.
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The revival, which sets Cats in the underground ballroom world, with each performer competing to win a vogue dancing competition, moves to Broadway after an acclaimed run at New York's Perelman Performing Arts Center last season.
The musical is set to play Broadway's Broadhurst Theatre starting March 18, 2026, ahead of an April 7 opening night. Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch direct, with choreography by Omari Wiles and Arturo Lyons.
Ard, Leimy and Battle complete the casting for the Broadway production, alongside the previously announced cast members, who took part in the Off-Broadway run: André De Shields as ‘Old Deuteronomy,' Jonathan Burke as ‘Mungojerrie,' Baby Byrne as ‘Victoria,' Tara Lashan Clinkscales, Sydney James Harcourt as ‘Rum Tum Tugger,' Dava Huesca as ‘Rumpleteazer,' Dudney Joseph Jr. as ‘Munkustrap,' Junior LaBeija as ‘Gus,' Robert “Silk” Mason as ‘Magical Mister Mistoffelees,' “Tempress” Chasity Moore as ‘Grizabella,' Primo Thee Ballerino as ‘Tumblebrutus,' Xavier Reyes as ‘Jennyanydots,' Nora Schell as ‘Bustopher Jones,' Bebe Nicole Simpson as ‘Demeter,' Emma Sofia as Cassandra'/'Skimbleshanks,' Garnet Williams as ‘Bombalurina,' and Teddy Wilson, Jr. as ‘Sillabub.'
Sherrod T. Brown (Hugh Jackman: From New York, With Love), Bryce Farris (Janet Jackson's Together Again tour), Phumzile Sojola (Masquerade), Kendall Grayson Stroud (Broadway debut), B. Noel Thomas (Saturday Church), Kalyn West (The Prom), and Donté Nadir Wilder (Broadway debut) will also join the cast in the ensemble.
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The move follows a standstill agreement signed with Mnuchin's Liberty 77 Capital and MHR Fund Management, led by studio chairman Mark Rachesky, to ensure "interests are aligned."
By
Etan Vlessing
Canada Bureau Chief
Lionsgate Studios has named Steven Mnuchin, a former Treasury Secretary in Donald Trump's first presidential administration, to its board of directors.
Bringing on the hedge fund operator and film producer follows Lionsgate signing a standstill and voting agreement with Mnuchin's Liberty 77 Capital L.P., and MHR Fund Management, LLC, run by Mark Rachesky, chair of the Lionsgate Board of Directors, according to a Jan. 26 regulatory filing. “Steven brings a long record of public and private sector leadership and is an exceptional addition to the Lionsgate Board,” Rachesky said in a statement on Monday.
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Standstill agreements typically prevent investors and their affiliates from acquiring shares beyond a certain limit and taking other actions with respect to the companies. Mnuchin holds around a 13 percent stake in Lionsgate Studios. News of his ascent to the board of directors sent stock in the Hollywood studio to $10.09 in early morning trading on Monday, which represents a 52-week high.
“His steady judgment, global perspective and deep industry insights will be enormously valuable as Lionsgate continues to grow as one of the world's leading pure-play content studios. Steven and his fund are significant Lionsgate investors, and his interests are aligned with those of Lionsgate shareholders. I and the rest of the Board look forward to working closely with him on the creation of further shareholder value,” Rachesky added.
The standstill agreement stipulates that “none of the Liberty parties and MHR Fund Management will engage in customary standstill actions, including increasing their ownership in the company above 17.5 percent, making unsolicited proposals, launching proxy contests, forming groups, or otherwise participating in activities that could challenge or circumvent the company's governance structure.”
Besides his hedge fund, Mnuchin co-financed the Avatar franchise and has over 35 executive producer credits. He is also managing partner of Liberty Strategic Capital, a private equity firm focused on technology, financial services, fintech and new media content.
“I have long admired Lionsgate's creativity, entrepreneurial spirit, and ability to excel in a competitive industry. I am pleased to join the company's Board. Lionsgate's board and management team are building something dynamic and forward‑looking, and I am eager to support that momentum. I look forward to helping guide the company in combining strong vision with disciplined execution,” Mnuchin said in his own statement.
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The best day with you.
Future in-laws Andrea Swift and Donna Kelce made a rare joint appearance at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, on Sunday.
The moms of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce looked friendly as they linked arms for a photo opp, beaming at the camera.
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For the daytime outing, Andrea wore a black-and-white patterned coat over a black long-sleeve shirt and matching leggings. The 68-year-old completed her look with brown sunnies, black and white boots and a black bag.
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As for Donna, who recently returned to the states after her short stint on “The Traitors,” the 73-year-old kept warm in a long gray puffer jacket, black pants, black sneakers and black gloves.
The future in-laws are gearing up for their children's upcoming wedding, which Page Six revealed will take place on June 13, 2026.
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Wedding planning seems to be the name of the game these days after Travis and his Kansas City Chiefs failed to make the playoffs for the first time since 2014, eliminating their chances to make it to the Super Bowl for the fourth time in a row.
However, for some time, the “Cruel Summer” singer was focused on lifting Kelce's “defeated” spirits over their upcoming wedding, per the DailyMail.
“Taylor is trying to put him in a better mood by spending more time with him and not bombarding him with wedding plans,” the insider said.
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“She would want him to focus on [the wedding] after he makes his career decision because she knows how important that is to him.”
The insider noted that Taylor, 36, is looking at the rough patch as the pair's “first real test of their relationship.”
“They have been together and in love and have enjoyed the success of her tour and career and his Super Bowls and his career. Travis hasn't been in this position before where he is staring at his future with complete 20/20 vision,” they said.
Travis, also 36, has been left feeling “a bit defeated” as retirement rumors hang in the air.
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As for when fans will know if the tight end will return to the NFL, the source said, “We will know a few weeks after the Super Bowl if he will be returning or not.
“That is his timeline that he has set to make a decision to play one more year or not,” they added.
Even if the football icon does not return to the field for another season, Page Six revealed the couple has their post-NFL life planned out with different projects.
The couple — who began dating in the summer of 2023 — announced their engagement in August 2025.
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As the author Salman Rushdie remembers it, the first clear thought that came to him after the brutal 2022 knife attack that almost took his life was simple: “We need to document this.” Fortunately, Rushdie's beloved wife, fellow writer and multidisciplinary artist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, was on hand with a fierce dedication and a new camera. (Griffiths remembers her take on the idea to document the after-effects of the attack with a little more bite: “We said that we want everyone to see.”)
And see we do in Alex Gibney's “Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie,” which combines Griffiths' footage (she is credited as one of the film‘s cinematographers; she is also its true heart) with archival material, new animations, tons of movie clips, and Rushdie's own work (mostly from his 2024 memoir “Knife: Mediations After an Attempted Murder,” but with plenty from his seminal “The Satanic Verses”). Gibney's film doesn't ease into it at all, opening with a clip of the attack, squarely dropping us into the horror of it. Rushdie provides voiceover throughout, and there is an immediate impact from hearing a man narrate his own attempted murder, and with such a calm (and often darkly humorous) demeanor.
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Griffiths faithfully totes her camera to the Pennsylvania hospital Rushdie is airlifted to after the attack at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York. When she and Rushdie are not fearlessly documenting the staggering scope of Rushdie's injuries (and, yes, that includes numerous shots of his right eye, which was hit during the attack and which he no longer has use of), Griffiths is hunkering down for solo interviews that take us straight into the heart of their love and her profound grief.
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But to understand why Rushdie was stabbed that day, we must also understand a story that unfolded more than three decades ago, and then even further back, to his own childhood in India. Gibney unspools an ambitious, three-pronged timeline that mixes and mingles throughout the documentary, including the immediate aftermath of the attack, Rushdie's youth and early years of writing, and what happened in 1988 after the publication of his “Satanic Verses.”
While many will remember that Rushdie was the subject of a fatwa from the Ayatollah Khomeini because of the contents of the book, which some Muslims believed was blasphemous against Islam and the prophet Muhammad in particular, Gibney's film powerfully catapults us back to 1988 and 1989 and the extreme fervor around the call to murder the author. Archival footage illustrates, in pulse-pounding and nerve-rattling fashion, just how widespread calls for Rushdie's murder were. Not just in Iran, but as far as Belgium, his own adopted hometown of London, even New York City. Bookstores that carried it were firebombed. People associated with its publication were beaten, some even killed. Rushdie went into hiding and remained under police supervision for nearly a decade.
The man who attacked Rushdie wasn't even born when the fatwa was put into effect, and while Rushdie mostly doesn't want to talk about the assailant, referring to him simply as “the A,” the doc eventually works up to a series of imagined conversations between the men. Such convos also appear in Rushdie's memoir, and have the bizarre effect of making us feel a distance from our subject and narrator when they appear in the latter half of the film. The reality of the situation is much more interesting, much more personal.
Rushdie himself did not know the full extent of his injuries for many weeks after, though we're confronted with them throughout “Knife” — the long line of staples up his stomach, the severed nerves of his left hand, the massive gash along his throat, and of course his ruined eye — witnesses to this document, being forced to truly see what was done to this man in the name of God and religion and faith and conviction. The revulsion that we feel toward this attack is, of course, baked right into the film, but Gibney often dances away from making it feel like a symptom of something wider. (That “the A” was radicalized partially by YouTube videos is the sort of thing deserving of its own film.)
Both the back-and-forth structure of Gibney's film and Rushdie's own words eventually bring us around to the idea that it's a chronicle of the many times Rushdie has had to remake himself (though we venture to say that recovering from the attack is a hell of a lot harder than reinventing himself by cameoing in “Bridget Jones's Diary” in 2001, just as he was emerging from his exile). Each time, something new is found, but something else is certainly lost.
The circular nature of the film and Rushdie's own life is further cemented in its final moments, as Rushdie and Griffiths return to the site of his attack more than a year after it occurred. That alone would be upsetting, but Rushdie, forever trying to understand the story of his own life, then walks his wife and her camera through all the moments before, during, and after the attack. Extended footage of the attack from all sorts of angles follows, much of it slowed down, horrifying, still hard to believe. At one point, the knife itself appears. At many others, we see Rushdie's face and hands. He's reaching, terrified, blood-soaked, but still alive. And you can't look away.
“Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie” premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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”I look forward to dying,” Bob Weir told Rolling Stone‘s Angie Martoccio early last year. “I tend to think of death as the last and best reward for a life well lived. That said, I've still got a lot on my plate and I won't be ready to go for a while.”
In the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, we play clips from that interview — which turned out to be his final encounter with Rolling Stone — in the wake of Weir's death earlier this month. The episode also includes a a guide to some of the highlights of Weir's career, and a new interview with Gov't Mule's Warren Haynes, who toured with the post-Jerry Garcia incarnation of the Dead in 2004 and 2009. To hear the podcast episode, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play above — some highlights from Haynes' interview follow.
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Haynes' last real conversation with Weir was about forming an acoustic trio with Dave Matthews — a project that never came to be. “Dave Matthews and myself and Bob played at a private event at Brooklyn Bowl,” he recalls. “We wound up on stage playing together, and we had a conversation afterward about how unique that blend was, and even talked about maybe taking it on the road. We all felt that there was something unique about it and there were several conversations about trying to make room for it at some point, which never happened.”
Haynes explains the mechanics of Weir's rhythm-guitar approach. “He wasn't necessarily coming up with a repeating pattern that worked as one of the gears of the song. He was kind of comping moment by moment behind whatever was going on. The second verse was different than the first verse. And the third verse was different from the second verse. He was just, moment by moment, making it up as he went along.”Haynes says he didn't mind when Weir moved on to Dead and Company, with John Mayer taking on Jerry Garcia's vocal and guitar duties instead of Haynes. “I never had any hard feelings about it,” says Haynes. “I never looked at it as a parting of ways. I looked at 2004 and 2009 as an opportunity for me to do something really cool with those guys. But I didn't think of it as something that was gonna keep going into the future.” He adds that he's a fan of Mayer's work with the band: “I think I was skeptical in the beginning like a lot of people were, but he really poured himself into it and did a great job. I think a lot of people were just not convinced that was gonna be the case, and he proved everybody wrong.”
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The Dead's dedication to improvisation meant that rehearsals were often pointless. “I remember there would be songs when we had spent like an hour working on some background vocal part,” Haynes says. “And then the song came up in the set list, and I would look up and no one was at their microphone. Everybody was just jamming and forgot all about the rehearsal. And hey, that's part of it too.”
When Weir joined Haynes for a symphonic Dead tribute, his guitar volume offended the orchestra. “We had added another electric guitar and another keyboard to the mix,” Haynes recalls. “So the symphony was not too happy about it. A bunch of the string players walked out at the end and refused to play because they said the volume was too loud. And of course, Bob was like, ‘Well, fuck 'em.'”
Download and subscribe to Rolling Stone‘s weekly podcast, Rolling Stone Music Now, hosted by Brian Hiatt, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Check out nine years' worth of episodes in the archive, including in-depth interviews with artists including Mariah Carey, Bruce Springsteen, Questlove, Halsey, Missy Elliott, Dua Lipa, Neil Young, Snoop Dogg, Brandi Carlile, Phoebe Bridgers, Yungblud, Rick Ross, Alicia Keys, the National, Brian May, Roger Taylor, Ice Cube, Taylor Hawkins, Willow, Keith Richards, Robert Plant, Killer Mike, Julian Casablancas, Sheryl Crow, Johnny Marr, Scott Weiland, Liam Gallagher, Alice Cooper, Fleetwood Mac, Elvis Costello, John Legend, Donald Fagen, Charlie Puth, Phil Collins, Justin Townes Earle, Stephen Malkmus, Sebastian Bach, Tom Petty, Eddie Van Halen, Kelly Clarkson, Pete Townshend, Bob Seger, the Zombies, and Gary Clark Jr. And look for dozens of episodes featuring genre-spanning discussions, debates, and explainers with Rolling Stone's critics and reporters.
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The 'Bugonia' and 'Poor Things' director will bring his surrealist style and visual flair to a campaign for the food delivery app.
By
Alex Weprin
Senior Editor
Over the course of his career, director Yorgos Lanthimos has crafted a distinct style of absurdist, surrealist and genre-defying filmmaking with projects like The Lobster, Poor Things and Bugonia.
But The Hollywood Reporter has learned that the Greek filmmaker is set to make arguably his most mainstream project yet: a Super Bowl commercial for Grubhub.
It will be the director's first Super Bowl ad (Grubhub's too), and fans of his work will immediately recognize his style.
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The food delivery app released a teaser spot for the campaign Monday morning, with a visual design that is distinctly his, and a cast of characters that like something straight out of one of his films. “This February, one food delivery app will finally put their mouth where their money is,” the teaser proclaims.
Watch:
The rest of the spot is being kept under wraps for now, but look for it to set a new tone for what to expect from Grubhub going forward.
It's worth noting that while Lanthimos is now best known for his incredibly distinctive style of filmmaking, he began his career in Greece directing commercials, music videos and experimental plays, so the campaign is not exactly outside his wheelhouse, even if it will be his Super Bowl debut.
The Big Game is the biggest advertising event of the year, and while some brands lean on raw star power to stand out, others try to craft something memorable and different in a bid to steal attention, and that appears to be the case here. So what does Lanthimos have planned? We will have to wait a bit longer to find out.
The spot was created and produced by creative agency Anomaly.
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A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms, much like the series of novellas on which it's based, is zeroed in on the humanity of its characters, ridiculous or embarrassed as they can sometimes be. If Ser Dunk's brief but energetic bout of diarrhea hadn't already made that clear, this week's vivid recounting of Ser Arlan Of Pennytree (Danny Webb) reiterates the point: The saga of Ser Duncan The Tall (Peter Claffey) and his squire Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell) is shaping up to be a bawdier, earthier affair than Game Of Thrones or House Of The Dragon, more Tyrion Lannister than Ned Stark.
That's not a bad thing. In fact, the series can be hilarious when it veers into lampoon, as it does when Dunk recounts the exploits of his fallen mentor to Leo “Longthorn” Tyrell (Steve Wall), giving us a fuller view of his ser's, um, greatness. We watch Arlan attend to his post-coital duties, as we listen to Dunk begging Tyrell to remember the man's deeds and to vouch for him for the lists at Ashford Meadow. It's a startling moment—not just for the hugeness of Ser Arlan's member, but for what else we see and the smash cut to black that follows as the title card drops. Says Dunk: “Even as he was dying, he just…he just got on with it.”
“Hard Salt Beef,” directed by Owen Harris and written by Aziza Barnes and series co-creator Ira Parker, strikes a nimble balance of irreverence and pathos that a less conscientious production would fumble. It's all in the brief morning quiet that follows Dunk's line, nestled in the blackness, before the episode begins in earnest. It allows us to clear our throats, settle in, and ruminate a bit on what Arlan meant to Dunk and what kind of man this fallen knight brought up. It's a phenomenal show of storytelling dexterity. Are we meant to interpret Arlan's enormous phallus as shorthand for the enormity of his modest legend in Ser Dunk's heart? Or was Ser Arlan simply granted by the gods a second, equally reliable sword?
Clearly, this moment isn't from Dunk's memory. Its frank intimacy rules that out, as does a detail that Dunk might have overlooked: a nasty red gash on Arlan's arm, perhaps from some minor scuffle or accident. He regards the wound silently before returning to bed, worry flashing quickly across his face followed by something resembling acceptance. Dunk's words at this exact moment—“he never complained”—suggest Arlan kept its severity from his squire. It represents the kind of knight Ser Arlan was: full of life and content with his lot. The words are Dunk's, but this memory, I think, is meant solely for us.
“Hard Salt Beef” ushers in a new day and a new host of worries for Ser Dunk. Tyrell's response to Ser Arlan's service, delivered through a mouthful of sourleaf, is curt and final: “I knew him not.” Lord Ashford's tourney looms, but our hedge knight, discouraged but undaunted, presses on with Egg squeaking in his ear. “[Arlan] can't have been a very good [knight] if no one remembers him.” It's a troubling thought for Dunk to chew on and one that will prove significant later. For now, his ser's relentless begging chafes Egg, who lets off a bit more steam than he likely means to: “You are a knight of the realm, ser; you can say fuck their permission, ride into the lists, call out Longthorn Tyrell, and turn his arsehole into a lance-hole!” Unbecoming language for a squire, perhaps, but the boy has a point: Why doesn't Dunk flex his rights as a knight of the Seven Kingdoms? Unless, of course, he has something to hide?
Dunk's secrets will keep for now. The heralds trumpet the arrival of House Targaryen, and all of Ashford Meadows snaps to attention—including Egg, who gets one peep at those banners and bolts back to camp. This frees Dunk to ingratiate himself indelicately with the ruling house: Baelor (Bertie Carvel), King Daeron's Hand and eldest son (see stray observations); Maekar (Sam Spruell), afforded lesser heraldry compared to his brother; and Prince Aerion (Finn Bennett), Maekar's haughty son, who clocks Dunk as a servant on sight. “I have the honor of being a knight!” Dunk insists, to which Aerion sneers, “Knighthood has fallen on sad days.” After a stablehand takes a princely hoof to the face, Dunk leads Aerion's horse to the stables, where he encounters two Kingsguard: Ser Roland Crakehall (Wade Briggs) and Ser Donnel Of Duskendale (Bill Ward).
Courteous and steeped in classism, this meeting charts the distance between hedge knight and royal knight. Donnel mocks Roland's grief about shitting in the stables (“a man of such birth has never deigned to disturb his arsehole with hay”), prompting a sympathetic retort from Dunk. Here, Donnel regards Dunk and claims humbler beginnings than his sworn brother—that he, like Dunk, is from “nowhere,” that his family has been crabbers since days immemorial. “May I ask, ser, how the son of a crabber came to have the honor of being a knight in the Kingsguard?” “Same way we became crabbers.”
Whatever Donnel meant by that—Egg clarifies matters later, which I'll get to—it sparks ambition within Dunk. Soon, he's skulking the service corridors of House Ashford, overhearing the Hand, Maekar, Lord Ashford (Paul Hunter), and Plummer, the master of games (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor), discuss the absence of Maekar's other two sons, Daeron and Aegon. Before he's caught sneaking, Lady Gwin Ashford (Cara Harris) creeps up behind him and casually suggests the missing princes could be dead—and that wars have started over less. She's playing with Dunk, another example of how the highborn treat smallfolk. She's perhaps even flirting with him in her own cracked way. (“You're big and stupid!” she says with a flick of her hand, causing Dunk to flinch.) But there's no time for love: Dunk's busted by Maekar, forcing the smelly hedge knight to plead his case before the Hand Of The King.
It's a fun scene. Plummer guides Dunk through his first, disastrous stab at politics with stiff nods and grimaces, and the dynamics of House Targaryen at this point in Westerosi history become clearer. Baelor is kind and patient, even if Dunk tests him with his fumbling entreaties; Maekar, all dragon fire, barely tolerates it. Baelor also recalls Arlan, which Maekar scoffs at. And so, after some mild dickering over Ser Arlan's joust with Baelor (four lances broke that day, not seven), Baelor grants Dunk his wish to join the lists on one condition: He must find a sigil of his own.
So, what will be the standard of Ser Duncan The Tall? Egg, back from camp, contributes an idea as Dunk brainstorms before Tanselle (Tanzyn Crawford), the puppeteer from Dorne who makes ser weak at the knees: a grand elm tree over a field of sunset hues and a shooting star soaring overhead. Will she paint this sigil for the hedge knight? Does she share Dunk's feelings as she nearly shares his height? The first answer comes quickly—she takes the shield with his thanks—while the second will have to stew awhile longer in sweet Dunk's head. There's plenty to distract him from love's subtle call: Lyonel Baratheon (Daniel Ings) bids him join a tug of war against House Tyrell (among others), and soon, the first jousts begin.
It's here where new facets of Egg begin to show. For starters, the joust brings out his inner flame: he roars himself hoarse and later swings a stick at invisible Blackfyre rebels. Where does this behavior come from? Certainly not the same part of King's Landing that Dunk's been to. And Dunk, meanwhile, gets a rude awakening about the caliber of knight he's up against: One rider (Ross Anderson's Ser Hardyng) is unhorsed at full gallop only to haul himself and his shield back into the saddle without his steed breaking stride. Strength alone may get him noticed, but it won't win Dunk Ashford Meadow. Then, there's an unbidden image: his dead ser lying in his muddy grave, a harsh contrast to the pomp he witnesses at the joust.
Back to Egg, who earlier showcased his knowledge about royal houses, including Duskendale. What he has to share reframes Ser Donnel in Dunk's estimation. This supposed “son of a crabber” is actually the heir to a maritime empire; his humility might be genuine, but it's not the same as Dunk's. Dunk doesn't fully understand the significance of Egg's savvy royal trivia yet—the boy seems to be more than he lets on, but he's got too many things rattling around in his skull—but he picks up that he and Ser Donnel are definitely not of the same stock. So what kind of knight will Ser Duncan be?
The better question is: What kind of knight does Duncan want to be? A peacocking Kingsguard, or a vainglorious braggart who chomps the heads off fish before running full tilt? Is that what a knight is? If so, what does that make Ser Arlan, who won no jousts, owned no lands, and died by the side of a muddy road? The answer is the kind of knight Dunk admires, which speaks to his heart. It's why the blacksmith Steely Pate (Youssef Kerkour) takes pity on him, why Baelor grants his greatest wish despite barely knowing him. The deep regret Dunk shows as he sells his horse, Sweetfoot, to afford proper armor says it all. Coming just moments after a rowdy, muddy, profanity-laden match between houses, the scene underscores what A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms is doing so well. Between raunchy knight-bro excess and a keenly felt heart, the series strikes a remarkable balance.
Jarrod Jones is a contributor to The A.V. Club.
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A schematic but sensitive prison drama about a maximum-security lifer who begins to care for an older inmate suffering from early-onset dementia, Petra Volpe's “Frank & Louis” soberly interrogates what it really means to “serve time.” Time may be the currency with which people are required to pay for their crimes, but as this gloomy two-hander confronts at every turn, the purgatorial nature of prison doesn't excuse convicts from being subjected to its effects.
Change is constant, even within the walls of an institution where people are rigidly defined by what they did before they got there. Bodies age. Minds harden or expand. New memories are made, coloring the old ones in a different light. Some felons become entirely different people, while others might lose sight of who they used to be altogether. Our punitive carceral system might prefer to pretend that criminals remain as static as the sentences that define them as such, but Volpe's film — dour and dull gray as it tends to be — palpably recognizes how even the smallest display of personal growth might seem like a genuine spectacle in a place where nothing ever changes, just as the slightest display of compassion might resonate with explosive force in a place that's unforgiving by design.
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A story about the weight of memory as it's shared between a pair of forgotten men, “Frank & Louis” never steps foot outside of the upstate New York penitentiary where the younger of its title characters is transferred at the start of the film. The first thing we sense about Frank (a crushed and compellingly recessive Kingsley Ben-Adir) is that he's used to life in a loose-fitting jumpsuit. Long and fit but dead behind the eyes in a way that makes him look much older than he is, Frank has been in prison for at least half of his time on this earth, though the only specific information we get is that it's been 17 years since he suffered through a stint in solitary confinement. He's cooled down since then. Maybe he's found a lasting measure of peace in the toy motorcycles he carves out of soap in his cell. Or maybe he's just given up.
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It's hard to glean much of anything from his non-reaction to the news that he's up for parole, but Frank agrees to join the Yellow Coats — the prison's in-house memory care program — in a bid to make him seem worthier of release. After just a few minutes with Louis (a fully committed Rob Nelson, never betraying his character's mental condition for the sake of a more emotionally digestible film) it feels like the gig might blow up in Frank's face, as he seems more liable to kill the old-timer than to help him tie his shoes. Louis is such a tough customer that Frank would sooner be assigned to the unit's biggest skinhead — at least that guy is too far gone to hate people anymore. Maybe it's just the fact that he looks like an oversized baby, but the towering bigot radiates a pitiable innocence that's only belied by his unavoidable swastika tattoo; the ink that identified him as a Nazi has outlasted the ideology that made him one in the first place.
Louis is a different story. Although a pale shadow of the vicious gang leader that he used to be, 60-year-old Louis still brims with the rage and ferocity that once made him king of the prison yard; all of the same emotions are still kicking around inside him, but they've been completely unmoored from their context, and sharpened by the shiv-like volatility of dementia. A roaring lion one minute and a helpless lamb the next, Louis is so clearly at the mercy of his disease that Frank struggles to imagine that his new friend could be the same man who made enemies or underlings out of all the other inmates. When another convict pressures Frank to let him beat the shit out of Louis in his cell (revenge for a previous slight of some kind), Frank agrees with an indifferent shrug — not only is it not any of his business, it doesn't seem to be Louis' business, either. At least not the Louis that he knows.
Ben-Adir and Morgan bring a raw and layered energy to the dynamic between their characters, and while the relationship between them thaws and complicates along a very predictable trajectory, progressive brain afflictions don't exactly lend themselves to novelty or surprises. That Volpe and Esther Bernstorff's script is overly diagrammed on a scene-by-scene basis is more difficult to ignore (when Frank and Louis sit down to play chess, you know it's only a matter of time before the latter swipes all of the pieces off the board in a fit of rage), but the actors are too locked into the circumstances at hand for the movie to ever meaningfully diminish the urgency of the questions it's trying to ask. It also helps that “Frank & Louis” tends to unfold in a minor key, and that even its most nakedly sentimental plot points — such as Louis' persistent belief that he's got a lunch date scheduled with his daughter — are undergirded by the kind of hard truths that leave you with a fuller appreciation for the lives these characters have led.
Still, “Frank & Louis” is at its best during the subtler moments when its minute human gestures contrast against the art house stiffness of Volpe's compositions (the Swiss “Late Shift” director brings a small but welcome dose of European formalism to her English-language debut), and the glassy abstractions of Oliver Coates' score. Watching Frank learn to touch Louis without either of them flinching is a movie unto itself (Rene Perez Joglar is excellent as a Yellow Coats veteran with hypersensitivities of his own), and it's heart-rending to watch these two men forge new sense memories between them in the short time they have together.
The more that Louis forgets about his past, the more that Frank comes to reconsider about his own, and while Frank's backstory isn't quite as textured as Volpe needed for her movie to deliver a lastingly powerful gut-punch, it crucially resists the temptation to answer its most pressing questions. What's the point of punishment if someone doesn't understand what they're being punished for? Are these the same men they were back when they committed their crimes? It's the Ship of Theseus paradox in human form, its discrete parts held together by a quietly stirring drama that finds dignity in decay, and grace in the memory of men who the rest of society would sooner forget.
“Frank & Louis” premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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Fans are swooning over the way longtime Hallmark actress Laura Vandervoort has started 2026 — with a fresh outlook, bold energy, and a hairdo to match.
The “Melt My Heart This Christmas” star surprised fans with several new social media photos revealing that her signature long blonde hair is now a rich brunette.
Although Vandervoort posted a couple of images earlier in the month with her dark hair, it wasn't quite clear if the new look was for a movie role. On January 14, however, she posted a cheeky video of herself in the car, looking deadly serious as Blur's “Song 2” played in the background.
As the band sang the lyrics — “It's not my problem / Woo-hoo / It's not my problem” — Vandervoort slipped on a pair of shades and flipped off the camera.
In the caption, she wrote, “Mantra for 2026… 🖕🏻🫶🏻” and added that her hair color was “By The Amazing” celebrity hairstylist Annastasia Cucullo, who commented, “Omg the hair looks great!! 😍”
In another post on January 21, Vandervoort shared a photo of her muscular back during a workout, with her hair up in a bun under a baseball cap. She captioned the photo, “Blondes may have ‘more' fun but brunette's get [expletive] done 😏”
Fans flooded Vandervoort's posts with heart and fire emoji, as well as praise for her new look. One wrote, “The hair is 🔥😍!!!!”
Someone else called the “Supergirl” and “Smallville” alum a “SuperBrunette” and another exclaimed, “saaaxyyye! 🤘💋❤️✨️”
Vandervoort tested out a light brunette look in November, posting a brief video of her with color that she told was a “temporary change” that she was considering making “permanent.”
Vandervoort unveiled her new look after posting a series of photos in December of her 2025 wedding to her longtime beau, Adam Coates. The couple, who met on a dating app, married in September, two years after getting engaged, per People.
The ceremony and reception, held at the Langdon Hall Country House, Hotel & Spa in Ontario, Canada, was held three months after the couple were legally married in a “little backyard celebration” with their family and dogs, they told the outlet.
“Miracle in Bethlehem, PA” star captioned one of her wedding posts, “We didn't do a traditional ceremony. Adam's very close friend Gerry Price was our officiant and spoke from the heart, our big sisters (Sarah & Sarah) gave their speeches/words of advice before our vows. Lots of laughter and tears.”
Really?!?!? Flipping us off?? I'm done watching her!
I'm not a prude but I'm with you Melodee. Totally unnecessary! Don't think I want to watch her anymore either!
Why on earth would Hallmark post a video of one of their “stars” flipping people off??!! Whoever is running the social media for Hallmark should actually look at their posts — and watch the videos they embed — before posting. What a disappointment!
I totally agree with the others. Totally unbecoming of her. Done also watching her. Shame on
Hallmark for posting. She always had a sour look on her face with her acting anyway.
To all the previous posters, judgy much?
I don't think she was personally flipping any of you off, yes maybe not the best choice of picture to add to the article, but to not watch an actor because of of this one gesture. Wow!
Not that it would matter to any of you, but I did read an article recently where she is having major fertility issues and maybe that was a gesture in response to what she is going through. Who knows?
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In this solo episode of The Michael Shermer Show, Michael Shermer responds to the shooting of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old healthcare worker who was killed by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis during protests over enforcement of immigration law.
As political debate intensifies, Shermer asks a tough question that most discussions are avoiding: What role does personal responsibility play in emotionally charged, high-risk situations?
He separates the facts we can reasonably assert from what remains uncertain and explains why scrutinizing frame-by-frame video misses something essential about how humans behave under stress and fear.
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The rapid spread of conspiracy theories about Victoria's recent bushfires – such as a government-orchestrated internet blackout, and lasers causing the blazes – has prompted warnings that misinformation will become more frequent as natural disasters increase because of climate change.
Premier Jacinta Allan was accused by some locals in Alexandra, which narrowly avoided disaster from the nearby Longwood fire, of deliberately switching off the internet in the area.
Before the premier's visit on January 13, government officials walking through the town, in central Victoria, were approached by locals who made the claim that the internet was being shut off intentionally. Some of these people were among the dozens who tried to confront Allan before and after a press conference and heckled her from outside Alexandra District Health.
Many locals asked valid logistical questions, such as when they would be able to access roads and provide feed to their livestock. They also questioned whether the government was adequately funding the Country Fire Authority.
Some locals also demanded to know why communications weren't working in the region.
Not long after, a screenshot of a WhatsApp message was circulated, alleging Health Minister Mary-Anne Thomas had told locals the government had shut down internet and phone services to stop the spread of misinformation. Others speculated the internet was switched off to coincide with Allan's visit and prevent locals from organising against her.
There is no evidence to suggest this is true. Premiers and other government officials do not have the power to switch off internet services. Communications were patchy as phone and internet towers were damaged in the fires, and services including electricity went down, prompting calls to better secure this infrastructure in emergencies.
But the rumour was just one of several conspiracy theories that emerged after 400,000 hectares were burnt. Some online posts, appearing on Facebook profiles and in local community groups, were shared hundreds of times across communities with small populations.
Other conspiracies circulated online include that the bushfires were deliberately lit to encourage wind farms. In the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires, a similar rumour alleged the fires were lit to enable high-speed rail.
Another theory was that the fires were started by “energy weapons” such as lasers. This has become a regular accusation by conspiracy theorists for bushfires around the world.
Posts circulating online alleged that houses were burnt but vegetation was not – a claim that AAP FactCheck demonstrated to be false.
Experts are warning that the spread of these types of conspiracies will only become more common as extreme weather events increase.
Dr Mathew Marques, a senior lecturer in social psychology at La Trobe University, said it was typical for conspiracy theories to emerge during times of crisis and collective trauma.
“It clearly will become more common with climate change effects increasing,” he said.
Marques said research suggested people turned to conspiracies for explanations at times of catastrophic events.
“The idea is that they're meant to provide this way for people to buffer this anxiety or reduce the frustration of these needs that they've got. Like the need for certainty, need for belonging, need for knowing,” he said. “But the reality is they actually make people feel worse.
“These kinds of stories about bogeymen, or state premiers pulling the strings, don't actually make people feel any better, even though they allow people to attribute the blame to a person, or sometimes a faceless group.”
Marques said people who accepted or promoted these theories often already had a distrust of government or institutions. But there was also a political element at play, he said, with people finding it easier to lay blame on groups with different political allegiances or from different social classes.
Marques said there was little evidence to suggest conspiracy theories had become more common, but social media made them more visible.
“It might just be we're more readily able to view people's sincere or insincere beliefs on social media, so people will talk about them ...” he said.
“It's really hard to gauge whether or not somebody sharing something online sincerely believes it, or whether they're doing it for another reason.”
A 2025 report from the Centre for Resilient and Inclusive Societies, titled Crisis Points, found natural disasters could have political and societal consequences that could be exploited by extremists.
“In so doing, they have tacitly, or sometimes directly, incited and conducted violence against government, response agencies and identified out-groups,” the report says. “It has become increasingly difficult to ensure the take-up of accurate messaging from government or authoritative sources.
“Deliberate disinformation campaigns by malign actors during natural disasters are also increasing and are causing multifaceted harms.”
Associate Professor Josh Roose, an extremism expert at Deakin University, said conspiracies would become more common, but the side effects of this trend were not well understood.
“Governments need a long-term strategy on how they're going to cope with the conspiracy theories that inevitably arise in these contexts,” he said. “It comes back to building trust and building trust with communities.”
Roose said evidence from the developing world showed a rise in extremist groups after natural disasters.
“There's a rapid decline in trust in government and there's a vacuum of information, and conspiracies tend to proliferate in that space,” he said.
Among those who were traumatised, there were also bad faith actors.
“There are people out there who are profiting from this, both financially but also politically, in seeking to build movements, he said.
“You've only got to get onto Telegram. Look at the “freedom” movement, which still exists to this day, and you'll see how quickly they proliferate in sovereign citizen circles.”
Authorities needed to be transparent and communicate effectively but shouldn't attempt the impossible task of controlling the online space, Roose said.
“What they can do is deal, in particular, with the impacted communities, be physically present on the ground, communicating with them on a daily basis through whatever mechanism necessary.”
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Kelli Saam is an anchor for Action News Now and rejoined the
team in 2021.
Kelli Saam is an anchor for Action News Now and rejoined the
team in 2021.
Tammy Pitkin worked as a real estate agent in Red Bluff. She disappeared during a trip to Oregon in Oct. 2022.
RED BLUFF, Calif. - The disappearance of Tammy Pitkin, a woman from Red Bluff, remains a mystery more than three years after she vanished while visiting Oregon. Pitkin was last seen on October 17, 2022.
Her new gray Toyota Camry was discovered 12 days later on a forest road, 30 miles east of Sweet Home, Oregon. This location is 400 miles from her home in Red Bluff.
Pitkin's new Toyota Camry was found abandoned on a remote forest road, 30 miles east of Sweet Home, Oregon.
Searchers scoured the area multiple times, but no trace of Pitkin was found. Pitkin's sister, Airaka Laughlin-Bento, said Tammy took her two dogs with her on a getaway to reset.
Tammy Pitkin's dogs, Trooper (left) and Cope (right), were with her at the time of her disappearance. Trooper was found alive near her abandoned car four months later.
Pitkin had lost her job and was going through a divorce. She was well-known in Red Bluff, where her ex-husband and adult son live. Pitkin worked as a realtor and volunteered at a local animal shelter.
Tammy Pitkin of Red Bluff vanished during a trip to Oregon in Oct. 2022
In February 2023, four months after her car was found, one of her dogs, Trooper, was discovered alive in the woods near where the car was recovered. There is still no sign of Tammy or her other dog, Cope.
Laughlin-Bento spoke about a person of interest in Tammy's disappearance. She said it's a man Tammy knew through family and business connections. At the time of Tammy's disappearance, he was living in the same area of Oregon where her car was found.
Tammy Pitkin's abandoned car was found off Highway 20 in rural Linn County, Oregon. It was about 30 miles east of Sweet Home, Oregon.
Laughlin-Bento believes her sister is dead but is dedicated to finding out what happened. She urged people in Red Bluff to help.
"Quit being afraid," Laughlin-Bento said. "I know there are people in Tammy's community who know what happens, who have details regarding what happened to her, things that could help us get her justice."
"What we need from the public at this point is any little detail that you think is insignificant," said Laughlin-Bento. "These are things that some people think, 'oh, that's not a big deal," but it is because it's part of the timeline."
Pitkin was 54 years old, 5'4", and weighed 160 pounds. She had blonde hair and hazel eyes. Anyone with information is urged to call the Linn County Sheriff's Office in Oregon at (541) 967-3911 or contact her sister on the Facebook page "Finding Tammy Pitkin."
Alex Rogue, host of the Shady podcast "Erased but Not Forgotten: The Tammy Pitkin Story," has interviewed people in Red Bluff and followed Pitkin's path into Oregon. The first four episodes are available on Spotify and other podcast platforms.
According to Alex Rogue, this is the timeline of Pitkin's disappearance:
Oct. 14, 2022: Tammy was last seen by colleagues and her adult son in Red Bluff
Oct. 15, 2022: Tammy left Red Bluff around 3:30 am, refueled in Redding, and drove to Oregon.
Oct. 16, 2022: Tammy stayed at a Best Western hotel in Sutherlin, Oregon.
Oct. 17, 2022: Tammy was last seen on surveillance video in Albany, Oregon.
Oct. 26, 2022: Husband reported Tammy missing to authorities in Tehama County, Calif.
Oct. 29, 2022: Hunters discovered Tammy's car abandoned on a forest road off Highway 20, 30 miles east of Sweet Home, Oregon in the Santiam Wilderness
Feb. 10, 2023: Tammy's dog Trooper was found alive in the woods near where her car had been found abandoned.
Kelli Saam is an anchor for Action News Now and rejoined the
team in 2021.
Kelli Saam is an anchor for Action News Now and rejoined the
team in 2021.
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Photo credit: Notre Dame – Official
Paris-based artist Notre Dame has launched the official webshop for PARANORMAL, his creative project spanning music, animation, and collectible design. The launch follows a standout 2025 for the artist, which included a sold-out gallery pop-up in Paris and his debut BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix, broadcast earlier this month.
Now live, the PARANORMAL webshop offers exclusive merchandise and collectibles, including a figurine modeled after the protagonist of Notre Dame's ‘Candy Cloud' music video, created by French animation duo Le Megapack. The item reflects the project's distinctive blend of anime-inspired art, electronic music, and storytelling.
The launch also arrives alongside a remix of Max Styler's ‘You & Me', released via NuModa Records. Notre Dame's version reimagines the original with his signature hybrid touch, weaving in cinematic detail and dancefloor energy.
Explore the webshop here.
Listen to ‘You & Me' below and grab your copy here.
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For a much-loved ballad on 1981's The Wild, The Willing And The Innocent, UFO turned to the criminal underworld for inspiration
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Although best known for high-energy rockers such as Let It Roll, Too Hot To Handle and Lights Out, UFO have always had a softer side. Their albums typically include at least one song in a mellower vein, of which Profession Of Violence from 1981's The Wild, The Willing And The Innocent album is a prime example.
UFO message boards long urged the band to revisit songs in this style, and from this era. Indeed, in 2011 singer Phil Mogg told Classic Rock that the band had considered adding it to their set list: “We've done Try Me (from Lights Out, 1977) recently and have thought about Belladonna (No Heavy Petting, 1976) and Profession Of Violence, too – just to mix the set up a bit.”
Good news, then. The story of Profession Of Violence starts with then-guitarist Paul Chapman explaining that he wrote the incredible guitar solo (that forms the second half of the track) paddling in the warm Caribbean waters lapping the island paradise of Montserrat while recording UFO's 1980 album No Place To Run…
“That's the only solo that I've ever written before I had a backing track," he told us in 2011. "I used to go down to the beach with an Ovation acoustic and just stand knee-deep in this beautiful, crystal clear water, just jamming away. There were no waves, I'd stand there for hours, while my feet shrivelled up. I came up with this melody there, and recorded it later on my Revox.
“I discovered that part of it is in a harmonic minor scale which I didn't even know about at the time. All I knew was that this thing sounded good. When I showed the chords to Phil he came up with the vocal and then I brought back the solo. We did it totally backwards.”
But Chapman's description of the writing process definitely jogged a memory with Mogg: “Yeah… That's what we used to do with a lot of Michael [Schenker]'s stuff, too. He'd put solos down and if it sounded really cool, we'd work out a chord sequence to go with it and put a song around the solo.”
The title and lyric came later, both inspired by the 1972 book The Profession Of Violence: The Rise And Fall Of The Kray Twins. Drummer Andy Parker reckoned: “That was a book that I had, originally. I'm not sure if I lent it to Phil or he bought his own, but he's always had this thing where he reads stories and gets ideas for songs.”
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Mogg: “I'd read the book and liked the title – although I preferred Profession Of Violence without the 'The' – and sometimes I write down different titles for later use. But I often forget things and they only come back to me years later and I think: ‘Oh, that'll work!'
“The lyric was more of a sad affair than the subject matter of the book – which was more of a fucked-up thing. Being banged up isn't very pleasant. If you're a big-time gangster maybe you get used to it, but for the average Joe it's not very pleasant and Profession Of Violence was more of a sympathetic ear for those left behind.”
The poignancy of Mogg's lyrics are superbly emphasised by a string section arranged by one Paul Buckmaster – a cellist best known for his 1970s work with Elton John, but who also worked with the Rolling Stones on Sticky Fingers, David Bowie's Space Oddity and, more recently, Axl and co's Chinese Democracy. But it was the Elton John track Sixty Years On (on his breakthrough eponymous second album) which led Mogg to choose him.
“I think he was supposed to have been working on the Flash Gordon soundtrack, but then they got Queen to do it so he had time to work with us.
“We were never very good with money so I didn't think to ask how expensive he might be. The album saw us run up a huge debt. We were just shown into Studio One and left to get on with it. It was near Oxford Circus and dead expensive…”
Neither Mogg or Parker can recalled how they ended up recording without a producer. Parker: “Steve Churchyard was the engineer but he ended up producing it with us. I'm wondering how the hell we ended up doing that – did Chrysalis just not give us a producer?! Why we would have been in Air London, good studios, where we'd have been running around like a chicken with no head? We needed producers to tell us what to do, otherwise we'd have just gone down the pub, drinking and not really getting much done!”
Mogg: “Leaving us to our own devices was never a very good idea. The debt just built up. It was only around 2002 that it finally got paid off.”
Mogg: “We did have a great time doing that album. There was none of that studio tension you sometimes get. Air was right in town and it felt like a real English rock'n'roll album.”
Last word, then, to the man who started it all, on recording the solo that ends it…
Chapman: “The day we recorded it, my red BC Rich 10-string arrived from America. We'd just been on tour with Aerosmith, and Joe Perry was playing one of these – a wicked space machine with all the bells and whistles on. I took one look at his and said: ‘I want one of those!' So I got in a cab to my mate Kevin's in Denmark Street, picked it up, came back to the studio, tuned it up, plugged it in, and the first thing I recorded was that solo!
“Steve Churchyard and I worked on it again later at Air Studios. At the end of the solo – which you don't hear now – I held that note, swooped it round, put this echo on it and it sounded like the end of World War III. It was amazing. I said something to Steve like: ‘It would be really, really dreadful if that got wiped,' and I found out later that that's exactly what he did. He just misheard me. We got our wires crossed or something. I think there was Special Brew involved. That's the only thing I regret about that album.”
This feature originally appeared in Classic Rock 156, published in April 2011, and updated in 2026. Paul Chapman died in 2020.
Freelance contributor to Classic Rock and several of its offshoots since 2006. In the 1980s he began a 15-year spell working for Kerrang! intially as a cub reviewer and later as Geoff Barton's deputy and then pouring precious metal into test tubes as editor of its Special Projects division. Has spent quality time with Robert Plant, Keith Richards, Ritchie Blackmore, Rory Gallagher and Gary Moore – and also spent time in a maximum security prison alongside Love/Hate. Loves Rush, Aerosmith and beer. Will work for food.
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