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Self-driving cars are often marketed as safer than human drivers, but new data suggests that may not always be the case.

Citing data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), Electrek reports that Tesla disclosed five new crashes involving its robotaxi fleet in Austin. The new data raises concerns about how safe Tesla’s systems really are compared to the average driver.

The incidents included a collision with a fixed object at 17 miles per hour, a crash with a bus while the Tesla vehicle was stopped, a crash with a truck at four miles per hour, and two cases where Tesla vehicles backed into fixed objects at low speeds.

Data privacy and AI services have not been the greatest of bedfellows. Studies have shown that employees regularly leak company secrets via assistants, and on-device AI services are a focus of vendors amid concerns about exactly what is being sent to the cloud.

The thought of confidential data being sent to an unknown location in the cloud to generate a helpful summary has clearly worried lawmakers, which is why there is a blanket ban. However, the issue has less relevance if the process occurs on the device itself.

The co-director of the Oscar-winning No Other Land has said his home and family have come under renewed attack, almost a year after the documentary on Israeli settler and army violence in the West Bank received an Academy Award.

Hamdan Ballal said a group of settlers who had conducted a long-running campaign of harassment against Palestinian villagers came on Sunday to his home in Susya, in the Masafer Yatta area on the southern edge of the West Bank.

Ballal, one of the documentary’s four directors, said that since an Israeli court order two weeks before had banned non-residents from the area – in a rare legal victory for Palestinian villagers – he had called the police. Two soldiers had come instead, accompanied by a local settler leader.

“The army came first and immediately raided our house, attacking everyone inside,” Ballal said, standing outside his small concrete home, set halfway up a rocky hillside.

The three men have no medical licenses. The US ambassador wants the investigation to stop, so he wants people without medical licenses performing medical procedures cause that is religious freedom? ...
Dutch news video

White also demanded an apology from the Belgian 'Vooruit' party leader Conner Rousseau over a video in which he compared Trump to Hitler, and threatened a U.S. travel ban. Rousseau refused to apologize.

Tenant and labor unions in Minneapolis and St. Paul have announced plans to carry out what they said would be the "largest rent strike in the United States in the last 100 years."

Beginning on March 1, if Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz does not meet their urgent demands for an eviction moratorium and rent relief, a coalition of nearly 26,000 workers has pledged to withhold rent, which they said could create a massive economic disruption.

The plans were announced on Tuesday by the tenants union Twin Cities Tenants, which is joined by five labor unions: Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 26, SEIU Healthcare Minnesota/Iowa, UNITE HERE Local 17, the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) 1005, and Communication Workers of America (CWA) 7250.

They argued that a freeze on rents is desperately needed after "nearly three months of federal occupation" under President Donald Trump's "Operation Metro Surge," which sent nearly 3,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other immigration agents to the area, resulting in multiple fatal shootings and a wave of civil rights violations, including explicit racial profiling.

The unions said the daily presence of militarized agents "has taken a painful economic toll on poor and working-class tenants across the Twin Cities."

"Over 35,000 low-income Twin Cities households were already unable to afford the rent before the federal siege," they said. "Estimates show over $47 million in lost wages among people who have not been safe to go to work, and at least $15.7 million in additional rental assistance needed due to lost household income—leaving many of those households at imminent risk of eviction."

Evictions in Hennepin County spiked by 45% between this January and last, while requests for financial assistance have nearly doubled, according to a report this month from the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder.

As the federal siege wore on and immigrants remained trapped in their homes, community members raised tens of thousands of dollars through GoFundMe campaigns. But it proved far too little to help the thousands of families suddenly at risk of losing their homes.

On January 30, tenant organizers, union members, and other local activists staged a sit-in at the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority and called for an immediate halt to evictions. Another group gathered outside the governor's mansion in St. Paul.

“We’re here today because federal immigration enforcement, eviction courts, and the police power of the state are converging to terrorize the same families,” said Jess Zarik, co-executive director of HOME Line. “Housing instability is being used as a weapon, and the scale of this crisis is unlike anything we’ve seen in our 34-year history.”

While city and state leaders have fought back rhetorically against the Trump administration's highest-profile abuses—including the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by agents last month—and called for accountability, organizers said they've been slow to remedy the wider effects it has had on working-class residents across the Twin Cities.

“A lot of people just can’t get to and from work because ICE has been stopping random cars on the road, largely based on what they think the skin color of the driver is,” said Klyde Warren, a Minneapolis renter and Twin Cities Tenants organizer. “How are you supposed to go to work and make money to pay your rent in those conditions? The answer is a lot of people just can’t right now, but the eviction courts are still operating as if things are normal and they’re not normal.”

Last week, Walz's office told Axios that the governor "does not currently have the legal authority to enact an eviction moratorium."

Walz enacted an eviction moratorium in early spring 2020, which tenant organizers said allowed renters to stay home safely to avoid risks from the Covid-19 pandemic. He did this using what is known as a "peacetime emergency" declaration, which allows the governor to circumvent typical rulemaking procedures during extraordinary circumstances.

The city councils of both Minneapolis and St. Paul voted unanimously last month for nonbinding resolutions calling on Walz to take similar action to protect vulnerable residents from displacement.

"Tenants in Minnesota are in a crisis. The federal invasion forced many of our neighbors to stay home and devastated our local economy," said Minneapolis City Council Member Aisha Chughtai (D-10). "We need real solutions for the cliff of the rental crisis we are facing on March 1."

"I will be going on rent strike on March 1, and I call on my constituents to join me, until we can get a real solution from our state government for this crisis," she said.

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Even as ICE's operation draws to a close, some agents are still deployed and arresting Twin Cities residents. Organizers said that even after the surge itself ends, the economic fallout will need to be addressed.

"We absolutely need an eviction moratorium," said Geof Paquette, the internal organizing director at UNITE HERE Local 17. "Our members were struggling to keep up with housing costs before ICE occupied our streets. It has now become an emergency as many of our members are behind in their rent. It's well past time for some relief."

The unions have estimated that if just 10,000 of their members withheld their rent, it could cause $15 million in economic disruption and pressure the city and state government into action.

"The people of Minneapolis and St. Paul have shown the way, fighting a federal invasion and caring for their neighbors; their fight and their care continue in this historic rent strike," said Tara Raghuveer, director of the Tenant Union Federation. "Tenants and workers have decided that... they have no other choice but to strike. In taking this step, they join a storied tradition of struggle. The struggle can end whenever the governor steps in to do what's right."

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One Hundred Horses by Giuseppe Castiglione, painted in 1728. Collected by the National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan. Today is Chinese New Year. In traditional Chinese culture, today marks the beginning of Horse Year.

Artist: Giuseppe Castiglione

Walking through the mine-infested field under intense Russian drone surveillance was the scariest part of the mission for 22-year-old infantryman Mykola.

"If you stop, you die," said Mykola, a small-framed soldier with dark circles under his eyes and a tired stare.

"When we were walking to get to the positions, it wasn't hard to walk — it was hard to realize that you may not walk out alive because there were a lot of our dead around."

The walk to his positions near the eastern town of Myrnohrad was 22 kilometers (about 14 miles). Weather conditions and the intensity of Russian drones dictate the pace. It can take anywhere from a day to two weeks, depending on how often he and his comrades need to take cover from Russian drones. Soldiers and commanders interviewed for this story are not identified by their full names due to security concerns.

Located merely five kilometers (about three miles) northeast of Pokrovsk, a key logistics hub in Donetsk Oblast, Myrnohrad — once a quiet town — has faced an onslaught of Russian offensives since the fall of 2025.

MBFC
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U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement cannot re-detain Kilmar Abrego Garcia because a 90-day detention period has expired and the government has no viable plan for deporting him, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday.

The Salvadoran national’s case has become a focal point in the immigration debate after he was mistakenly deported to his home country last year. Since his return, he has been fighting a second deportation to a series of African countries proposed by Department of Homeland Security officials.

The government “made one empty threat after another to remove him to countries in Africa with no real chance of success,” U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, in Maryland, wrote in her Tuesday order. “From this, the Court easily concludes that there is no ‘good reason to believe’ removal is likely in the reasonably foreseeable future.”

In 2013, Nicole and Dan Virgil lived in a lush, affluent suburb of Chicago. Dan had a good job. Nicole home-schooled their two kids.

Nicole decided to plant her own garden. She and her husband Dan, an engineer, don’t do things by half-measures. They watched YouTube videos on gardening, checked books out of the library and drew up plans. They built a raised bed and dug a wicking reservoir under it lined to store stormwater and drain the swampy, clay soils. They experimented with two plots. They dropped seeds directly into the spaded-up lawn and other seeds into a fertilized raised bed. Most seeds rotted in the clay soils of the lawn. Those that germinated did not thrive in the nutrient-poor earth, but the seeds in the raised bed sprang up in a few days and thrived, producing in coming months vegetables of deep vibrant colors that were delicious.

Autumn comes swiftly to Chicagoland. The Virgils hated to stop gardening. On the web, Nicole noticed farmers in Maine extended the growing season with long, plastic tunnels called hoop houses. You can buy hoop house kits for a couple of hundred dollars, but the Virgils are DIY people. Dan drew up plans for a wood frame connected with PVC pipes. He shored up the supports so the tunnel could withstand 80 mph winds and heavy snow loads. He carefully calculated the height and width of the tunnel to maximize the buildup of passive solar heating inside. They located the hoop house in the middle of the backyard, so it was not visible from the street.

The one thing the Virgils did not think about was the city’s zoning board. Dan and Nicole had lived in Elmhurst for several decades. Elmhurst is a town of squat, white-trimmed, yellow-brick ranch houses placed in the center of spacious lots like iced pastries on a tray. Green lawns frame the houses. The lawns are largely unfenced, rolling along block after block, connecting one neighbor to another, a green communal thread. The Virgils saw neighbors build hockey rinks in their front yards and assemble trampolines and outdoor living rooms in their backyards. They figured the hoop house fell in the same category of a temporary recreational structure. They didn’t count on one neighbor calling the city, asking if the hoop house needed a permit.

One day, they came home to find a Property Maintenance Violation Notice on their front door. The city required a permit for their “greenhouse.” The Virgils stopped building. Dan went down to City Hall and explained their goal—to extend the growing season for a few months. They were not building a greenhouse. They’d take the hoop house down in the spring. He came away with the understanding that as long as the tunnel was temporary, it was ok, like the skating rinks and summer cabanas.

The winner of the Goncourt, as the prize is called, is likely to enter the pantheon of world literature, joining a lineage of writers that includes Marcel Proust and Simone de Beauvoir. The prize is also a financial boon for authors. As the biggest award in French literature, the Goncourt means a prime spot in storefronts, foreign rights, prestige. By one estimate, winning the Goncourt means nearly €1m of sales in the weeks that follow.

In November 2024, the Académie Goncourt gave the prize to a novel by Kamel Daoud, a celebrated Algerian writer living in France. His victory came at a tense moment for France and its former colony. The relationship, never an easy one, had been strained by the Algerian state’s increasing political repression of its people and French involvement in the dispute between Algeria and Morocco over Western Sahara. (France has sided with Morocco, which claims sovereignty over the territory; Algeria has supported independence movements there.)

Houris, which was not published in Algeria, tells the story of the war through a 26-year-old woman, Fajr or Aube (Dawn), who, as a child, survived a massacre at Had Chekala, a village where a real massacre took place in January 1998. In the novel, terrorists killed Aube’s family and cut her throat with a knife. The attack gave her a large scar across her neck: her “smile”, as she calls it. To breathe, Aube has undergone a tracheostomy, a procedure through which the neck is opened to access the windpipe. She wears a cannula, which she sometimes hides with a scarf. “I always choose a rare and expensive fabric,” she says. But the injuries from the attack mean that, two decades on, her voice is barely audible. For her, the scar is a sign of a history that many want to forget. “I am the true trace, the most solid of signs of everything we lived through for 10 years in Algeria,” she says.

Eleven days after the Goncourt ceremony, a woman appeared on an Algerian news show. She wore a blue-and-white-striped shirt; her long hair was tied into a bun. This left her neck visible, and attached to it, some breathing apparatus with a cannula. She introduced herself as Saâda Arbane, 30. Daoud, she claimed, had stolen her personal details to make his bestseller. “It’s my personal life, it’s my story. I’m the only one who should determine how it should be made public.” For 25 years, she said, “I’ve hidden my story, I’ve hidden my face. I don’t want people pointing at me.” But, Arbane said, she had confided in her psychiatrist. “I had no filter, no taboos. I told her everything.” Her psychiatrist was Kamel Daoud’s wife.

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Child sexual abuse in the UK is soaring, police have said, with 1,000 paedophile suspects being arrested each month and the number of children being rescued from harm rising by 50% in the last five years.

The National Crime Agency said the growth in offending across the UK was driven by technology and linked to the radicalisation of offenders in online forums, encouraging people to view images of child sexual abuse by reassuring them it was normal.

Most contact with children happened on mainstream social media platforms, with algorithms pushing paedophilic material to people who have shown a previous interest in it.

The significant increase in every measure “really worries us”, said Rob Jones, the NCA’s director general of operations.

Leads about people interested in sexually abusing children had risen tenfold in a decade, he said, with 1,200 children a month being safeguarded.