Exclusive: More than 150 anonymous channels using cheap AI tools to spread false stories about Keir Starmer, study finds
YouTube channels spreading fake, anti-Labour videos have amassed more than a billion views this year, as opportunists attempt to use AI-generated content to profit from political division in the UK.
More than 150 channels have been detected in the last year that promote anti-Labour narratives, as well as outright fake and inflammatory accusations about Keir Starmer.
Continue reading...Nobel prize winner Ales Bialiatski and opposition figure Maria Kalesnikava among those freed after US talks with Alexander Lukashenko
The Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, freed 123 prisoners on Saturday, including Nobel peace prize winner Ales Bialiatski and leading opposition figure Maria Kalesnikava, after the US lifted sanctions on Belarusian potash, a key export.
The announcement came after two days of talks with an envoy of the US president, Donald Trump, the latest diplomatic push since the Trump administration started talks with the autocratic leader.
Continue reading...New England's last coal-fired power plant "has ceased operations three years ahead of its planned retirement date," reports the New Hampshire Bulletin. "The closure of the New Hampshire facility paves the way for its owner to press ahead with an initiative to transform the site into a clean energy complex including solar panels and battery storage systems." "The end of coal is real, and it is here," said Catherine Corkery, chapter director for Sierra Club New Hampshire. "We're really excited about the next chapter...." The closure in New Hampshire — so far undisputed by the federal government — demonstrates that prolonging operations at some facilities just doesn't make economic sense for their owners. "Coal has been incredibly challenged in the New England market for over adecade," said Dan Dolan, president of the New England Power Generators Association. Merrimack Station, a 438-megawatt power plant, came online in the1960s and provided baseload power to the New England region for decades. Gradually, though, natural gas — which is cheaper and more efficient — took over the regional market... Additionally, solar power production accelerated from 2010 on, lowering demand on the grid during the day and creating more evening peaks. Coal plants take longer to ramp up production than other sources, and are therefore less economical for these shorter bursts of demand, Dolan said. In recent years, Merrimack operated only a few weeks annually. In 2024, the plant generated just0.22% of the region's electricity. It wasn't making enough money to justify continued operations, observers said. The closure "is emblematic of the transition that has been occurring in the generation fleet in New England for many years," Dolan said. "The combination of all those factors has meant that coal facilities are no longer economic in this market." Meanwhile Los Angeles — America's second-largest city — confirmed that the last coal-fired power plant supplying its electricity stopped operations just before Thanksgiving, reports the Utah News Dispatch: Advocates from the Sierra Club highlighted in a news release that shutting down the units had no impact on customers, and questioned who should "shoulder the cost of keeping an obsolete coal facility on standby...." Before ceasing operations, the coal units had been working at low capacities for several years because the agency's users hadn't been calling on the power [said John Ward, spokesperson for Intermountain Power Agency]. The coal-powered units "had a combined capacity of around 1,800 megawatts when fully operational," notes Electrek, "and as recently as 2024, they still supplied around 11% of LA's electricity. The plant sits in Utah's Great Basin region and powered Southern California for decades." Now, for the first time, none of California's power comes from coal. There's a political hiccup with IPP, though: the Republican-controlled Utah Legislature blocked the Intermountain Power Agency from fully retiring the coal units this year, ordering that they can't be disconnected or decommissioned. But despite that mandate, no buyers have stepped forward to keep the outdated coal units online. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) is transitioning to newly built, hydrogen-capable generating units at the same IPP location, part of a modernization effort called IPP Renewed. These new units currently run on natural gas, but they're designed to burn a blend of natural gas and up to 30% green hydrogen, and eventually100% green hydrogen. LADWP plans to start adding green hydrogen to the fuel mix in 2026. "With the plant now idled but legally required to remain connected, serious questions remain about who will shoulder the cost of keeping an obsolete coal facility on standby," says the Sierra Club. One of the natural gas units started commerical operations last Octoboer, with the second starting later this month, IPP spokesperson John Ward told Agency]. the Utah News Dispatch.
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Cuban foreign ministry called US military action ‘maritime terrorism’ under a policy of ‘economic suffocation’
Cuban officials have denounced the US seizure of the Skipper oil tanker off Venezuela’s coast on Wednesday, calling it an “act of piracy and maritime terrorism” as well as a “serious violation of international law” that hurts the Caribbean island nation and its people.
“This action is part of the US escalation aimed at hampering Venezuela’s legitimate right to freely use and trade its natural resources with other nations, including the supplies of hydrocarbons to Cuba,” the Cuban foreign ministry statement said.
Continue reading...Psychiatry professor theorizes that the difference is related to how the substances interact with areas of the brain
A recent review of alternative treatments for obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) indicates that psychedelic treatments show promise for the disorder while cannabis does not.
Dr Michael Van Ameringen, a psychiatry professor at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada and lead author of the review published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, said that 40-60 % of OCD patients get either partial or no relief with available treatments, including SSRIs and exposure and response prevention therapy.
Continue reading...Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols files this report from Tokyo: At the invitation-only Linux Kernel Maintainers Summit here, the top Linux maintainers decided, as Jonathan Corbet, Linux kernel developer, put it, "The consensus among the assembled developers is that Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental — it is now a core part of the kernel and is here to stay. So the 'experimental' tag will be coming off." As Linux kernel maintainer Steven Rosted told me, "There was zero pushback." This has been a long time coming. This shift caps five years of sometimes-fierce debate over whether the memory-safe language belonged alongside C at the heart of the world's most widely deployed open source operating system... It all began when Alex Gaynor and Geoffrey Thomas at the 2019 Linux Security Summit said that about two-thirds of Linux kernel vulnerabilities come from memory safety issues. Rust, in theory, could avoid these by using Rust's inherently safer application programming interfaces (API)... In those early days, the plan was not to rewrite Linux in Rust; it still isn't, but to adopt it selectively where it can provide the most security benefit without destabilizing mature C code. In short, new drivers, subsystems, and helper libraries would be the first targets... Despite the fuss, more and more programs were ported to Rust. By April 2025, the Linux kernel contained about 34 million lines of C code, with only 25 thousand lines written in Rust. At the same time, more and more drivers and higher-level utilities were being written in Rust. For instance, the Debian Linux distro developers announced that going forward, Rust would be a required dependency in its foundational Advanced Package Tool (APT). This change doesn't mean everyone will need to use Rust. C is not going anywhere. Still, as several maintainers told me, they expect to see many more drivers being written in Rust. In particular, Rust looks especially attractive for "leaf" drivers (network, storage, NVMe, etc.), where the Rust-for-Linux bindings expose safe wrappers over kernel C APIs. Nevertheless, for would-be kernel and systems programmers, Rust's new status in Linux hints at a career path that blends deep understanding of C with fluency in Rust's safety guarantees. This combination may define the next generation of low-level development work.
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California governor says order pushes ‘grift and corruption’ instead of innovation just hours after president’s dictum
The ink was barely dry on Donald Trump’s artificial intelligence executive order when Gavin Newsom came out swinging. Just hours after the order went public Thursday evening, the California governor issued a statement saying the presidential dictum, which seeks to block states from regulating AI of their own accord, advances “grift and corruption” instead of innovation.
“President Trump and David Sacks aren’t making policy – they’re running a con,” Newsom said, referencing Trump’s AI adviser and crypto “czar”. “Every day, they push the limits to see how far they can take it.”
Continue reading...Arabella McCormack, 11, died after being tortured and starved by adoptive family and police and church failed to intervene
A lawsuit over the death of an 11-year-old California girl who was allegedly tortured and starved by her adoptive family reached a settlement on Friday totaling $31.5m from the city and county of San Diego as well as other groups.
The suit was brought on behalf of the two younger sisters of Arabella McCormack, who died in August 2022. The girls were ages six and seven at the time. Their adoptive mother, Leticia McCormack, and McCormack’s parents, Adella and Stanley Tom, are facing charges of murder, conspiracy, child abuse and torture. They pleaded not guilty to all charges, and their criminal case is ongoing.
Continue reading...Health secretary wrote to Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, urging her to ‘take heat and ideology’ out of debate
Health secretary Wes Streeting has called on the Conservatives to maintain the “cross party consensus” on gender identity services built before the last election in a letter to Kemi Badenoch.
Streeting wrote to opposition leader on Friday urging her to “take the heat and the ideology” out of debate amid controversy over a puberty blocker trial for children.
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