Musk says Labour looking for ‘any excuse for censorship’ amid X row Daily Mail
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05 Sci-Tech
“Ukraine is using at least one adapted Antonov An-28 Cash twin-turboprop utility aircraft as part of its anti-drone inventory. While images of the aircraft, replete with multiple drone-kill marks, had previously been published, we now get to see the aircraft’s armament, a six-barrel, Gatling-type, M134 Minigun, in action, too.” — Thomas Newdick, for The War Zone, February 5, 2026.
“It’s two in the morning. There are targets in the air in the southeast. As pilots, we try to counter these drones using our aircraft, shooting them down with a machine gun.” — Ukrainian An-28TD aircrew member, February 2026.
Taiwan has told Washington that its proposal to move 40% of the island’s semiconductor supply chain to the U.S. was “impossible,” the country’s top tariff trade negotiator said in an interview.
Speaking on a local television broadcast Sunday, Vice Premier Cheng Li-chiun said she had made it clear to Washington that the country’s semiconductor ecosystem, built over decades, could not simply be relocated.
Taiwan’s international expansion, including its investments in the U.S., is predicated on the notion that the industry remains’ rooted in Taiwan and continues to expand domestic investments, she said in Mandarin, translated by CNBC.
Elon Musk confirms ‘SpaceX and xAI are now one company’; says future of AI is in space (Image Source – X/ xAI)
SpaceX has moved to absorb Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence start-up xAI, bringing the smaller company and its Grok chatbot under the aerospace firm’s control. The deal continues Musk’s broader effort to align his technology businesses more closely, linking artificial intelligence with space launch systems and satellite infrastructure. The merger would allow closer coordination between AI development, space-based communications, and satellite networks. Elon Musk believes today’s AI is about to hit a wall on Earth. Analysts cited by the BBC estimate xAI’s value at around $125bn, while SpaceX is valued at roughly $1tn, reinforcing its position as the world’s most valuable private company.
The DOJ and multiple states have filed notices to appeal a federal court ruling in the Google Search antitrust case that imposed limited restrictions on the internet giant’s conquest of the search and AI market. The verdict was so friendly to Google that one analyst called it “a home run for the status quo.”
Bloomberg reports that the DOJ and a coalition of states announced Tuesday they will appeal a September 2025 federal court decision that is widely considered to be the best case scenario for Big Tech following a landmark antitrust case. The appeal targets a ruling by US District Judge Amit Mehta that allowed the tech giant to avoid major structural changes despite being found guilty of operating an illegal monopoly in the search market.
Car ownership used to come with an unspoken assumption: You bought the vehicle, and it was yours to maintain, repair, and service in any way you saw fit. That assumption is quietly eroding. And one of the clearest signs doesn’t involve software updates or subscription features.
It involves a screw.
Tasks once considered routine — such as clearing fault codes or accessing safety systems — now often require dealer-level credentials or paid subscriptions.
Will the ubiquity of chatbots lead to a generation of doctors who don’t know their stuff? That’s the danger, according to a new editorial in BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine.
The authors, led by Jacob Hough at the University of Missouri, outline the many ways that AI use can undermine medical education, like automation bias, de-skilling, and providing false information.
“These tools can fabricate sources, encode bias, lead to over-reliance and have negatively disruptive effects on the educational journey. Medical programmes must be vigilant about these risks and adjust their curricula and training programmes to stay ahead of them and mitigate their likelihood,” they write.
NEW ORLEANS, LA — In a major development reflecting the ongoing impact of the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1), which criminalizes firearm possession by felons, is unconstitutional as applied to a Mississippi man whose only felony conviction was for “simple possession of methamphetamine.”
Charles Hembree was indicted in 2022 under § 922(g)(1) after authorities discovered he possessed a firearm. His lone prior felony was a 2018 Mississippi state conviction for meth possession. Hembree moved to dismiss the indictment, arguing the law violated his Second Amendment rights under the framework set forth in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. The district court denied that motion.
Trump administration to create a strategic reserve for rare earth elements The Journal Gazette
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‘AI swarms’ are mass-producing credible misinformation. Democracy may get stung observer.co.uk
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PARIS — French prosecutors searched the offices of Elon Musk’s social media platform X on Tuesday as part of a preliminary investigation into a range of alleged offences, including spreading child sexual abuse images and deepfakes.
The investigation was opened in January last year by the prosecutors’ cybercrime unit, the Paris prosecutors’ office said in a statement. It is looking into alleged “complicity” in possession and spreading of pornographic images of minors, sexually explicit deepfakes, denial of crimes against humanity and manipulation of an automated data processing system as part of an organized group, among other charges.
In addition, prosecutors filed a request for “voluntary interviews” of Elon Musk and Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X from 2023 to 2025, scheduled for April 20. Employees of the platform X have also been summoned that same week in April to be heard as witnesses, the statement said.
SpaceX Wants a Million Satellites for AI: Is This the Future of Computing or a Space Disaster Waiting to Happen?
SpaceX has submitted a daring proposal to the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch a constellation of up to one million satellites into Earth orbit, not for Internet coverage like Starlink but as orbital data centers designed to power artificial intelligence applications on a global scale. The plan, if approved, could reshape how humanity processes data, runs AI models and thinks about computing infrastructure and it is already stirring excitement and controversy across tech and space communities.
According to a recent report, the White House is set to start using artificial intelligence to write new transportation regulations. It’s no longer a question whether this technology will have power over our lives — that moment has arrived.
As its influence grows, AI will be the source of even more heated political debates. Some on the left are horrified about the lack of DEI and the hateful expression in AI, while the White House has claimed it is too woke. Some say AI is scraping from predominantly Western sources, so it is too Western. Some Christians are horrified by the implications of what happens when you ask generative AI moral and spiritual questions, while others seriously argue that AI can be an ethical counselor and decisionmaker. The AI debates, be they political or moral, are all framed around competing assertions of truth.
The medical watchdog group Do No Harm published a report this week, disputing claims made in a widely-cited study conducted by economists Michael Frakes and Jonathan Gruber that suggests increasing the share of Black physicians in military medical facilities leads to better outcomes for Black patients.
Climate science has been hijacked by philosophical globalism and alarmism, psychology research is controlled by gender, anti-racism, and decolonization ideologies, and unorthodox studies are shunned and blackballed.
So say Breakthrough Institute senior fellow Patrick Brown, Benjamin Lovett from Teachers College, Columbia University, and Andrea Clements, the assistant chair of East Tennessee State University’s Department of Psychology, in interviews with The College Fix and panels they have taken part in over the last year.
Ideological, political, and corporate interests now influence research and its outcomes, say the trio of scientists representing the fields of psychology and climate science.
Big Tech social media companies could face Big Tobacco moment as landmark trial begins baltimoresun.com
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The e-commerce giant has been cutting costs while pouring resources into building data centers to compete in the race to dominate artificial intelligence.
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TikTok Faces Backlash, Outages, Competition Following Change In U.S. Ownership 01/27/2026 MediaPost
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PARIS: French lawmakers on Monday (Jan 26) were set to vote on draft legislation to ban social media for under-15s, an effort championed by President Emmanuel Macron as a way to protect children from excessive screen time.
The legislation, which also provides for a ban on mobile phones in high schools, follows Australia banning social media for under-16s in December, a world first.
As social media has grown around the world, so has concern that too much screen time is arresting child development and contributing to declining mental health in minors.
“The emotions of our children and teenagers are not for sale or to be manipulated, either by American platforms or Chinese algorithms,” Macron said in a video broadcast on Saturday.
‘Epoch-making’: Xi Jinping urges home-grown AI breakthroughs – but flags risks South China Morning Post
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A chilling new “suicide pod” has been unveiled that seeks to streamline the euthanasia process by gassing two people to death at once, all while being powered by artificial intelligence (AI) automation to eliminate human safeguards.
The disturbing new AI-powered “suicide pod” is being pushed forward by a radical euthanasia activist, accelerating what critics warn is a globalist effort to normalize mechanized death under the guise of “choice.”
The new device is known as the “Double Dutch Sarco.”
The U.S. and Taiwan recently reached a historic trade deal. Taiwanese companies will invest at least $250 billion in U.S. semiconductor manufacturing. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s largest chipmaker, pledged $100 billion in U.S. investment in 2025. Taipei will provide an additional $250 billion in credit guarantees to Taiwanese companies.
Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari couched a chilling prediction within a warning at the World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, Switzerland: Artificial Intelligence (AI) will soon control not only most of the world’s legal, education, and healthcare systems, “AI will take over religion.”
“This is particularly true of religions based on books, like Islam, Christianity, and Judaism,” the homosexual atheist claimed.
“Anything made of words will be taken over by AI,” said Harari, so, “What happens to a religion of the book when the greatest expert on the holy book is an AI?”
Water demand for AI expected to surge, new research says Water Finance & Management
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Elon Musk Seeks $134 Billion in Damages from OpenAI and Microsoft in Legal Battle breitbart.com
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World has entered an era of ‘global water bankruptcy,’ U.N. warns
Humans are using more water than Earth can support, with many water sources already damaged beyond repair, a report from the United Nations found
Humans use more water than the planet can support, entering an era of “global water bankruptcy,” a new report from the United Nations warns. Almost 75 percent of the world’s population now lives in countries that are experiencing significant water insecurity, according to the report.
Rivers, lakes, wetlands and other water sources are already “damaged beyond realistic prospects of full recovery,” the report states.
The report compares the situation to a bank account going into the red: humans are using more water than our planet can produce and using more water that is stored in sources such as glaciers, wetlands and aquifers.
Where did cannabis compounds like THC, CBD, and CBC come from? Scientists at Wageningen University & Research have now provided the first experimental proof showing how cannabis developed the ability to make these well-known cannabinoids. Along the way, the team also created enzymes that could be useful for producing cannabinoids through biotechnology, especially for medical use.
Their findings were published in the scientific journal Plant Biotechnology Journal. To reach these conclusions, the researchers rebuilt enzymes that no longer exist today but were active millions of years ago in early ancestors of the cannabis plant. Enzymes are essential to cannabinoid production in cannabis, driving the chemical reactions that create these bioactive compounds with recognized medicinal potential.
A recent study published in Cell Reports Medicine demonstrated that, under the right conditions, the brain can repair itself using a compound that restores NAD+ levels.
Although conducted in animal models, this research offers a ray of hope for someday treating Alzheimer’s disease (AD). It serves as a vital reminder that we must never abandon hope or withhold care from anyone, no matter how fragile their medical condition or health.
For decades, AD has long been thought to be permanent and irreversible. Yet, researchers from Case Western Reserve University, University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center, and the Louis Stokes VA Medical Center in Cleveland found that restoring proper levels of the critical cellular energy molecule NAD+ not only prevented AD-like pathology in mice but also reversed advanced cognitive decline and brain injury.
SPRINGFIELD, VA — Gun Owners of America (GOA) and Gun Owners Foundation (GOF) have secured a major legal win following a Department of Justice (DOJ) Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinion that declares a longstanding federal statute restricting the mailing of handguns unconstitutional under the Second Amendment.
The decision stems from the case Shreve v. U.S. Postal Service, filed in July 2025 in the Western District of Pennsylvania. GOA brought the lawsuit on behalf of its members, challenging 18 U.S.C. § 1715 — a statute that has prohibited law-abiding Americans from using the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) to ship or receive concealable firearms, such as pistols and revolvers.