News

The Associated Press sued three Trump administration officials Friday over access to presidential events, citing freedom of speech in asking a federal judge to stop the 10-day blocking of its journalists.

30% of California’s firefighters are incarcerated, and many make as little as $6 a day.

The BBC has pulled its documentary about children in Gaza from iPlayer after mounting pressure over a featured child being the son of a Palestinian minister, in a move some commentators have slammed as "cowardly".

Outrage over Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone reached its highest point on Wednesday and Thursday, with the Israeli ambassador in London complaining to Britain's public broadcaster, and culture secretary Lisa Nandy saying she will "be discussing" the issue with the BBC.

Most criticism has focused on the fact, first reported by researcher David Collier, that the documentary's 13-year-old narrator Abdullah Alyazouri is the son of a minister in Gaza's Hamas-run government.

Middle East Eye found on Thursday that Dr Ayman Alyazouri, Gaza's deputy agriculture minister, appears to be a technocrat with a scientific background who previously worked for the United Arab Emirates government and studied at British universities.

Earlier this week a group of 45 prominent Jewish journalists and members of the media, including former BBC governor Ruth Deech, piled on pressure by sending a letter to the broadcaster demanding the film be removed from the iPlayer.

Even the fucking RN knows this isn't a good look.

UnitedHealthcare is in hot water again as the insurance giant grapples with a reported government investigation of its Medicare billing practices, pursues employee buyouts and potential layoffs, and clashes publicly with billionaire Bill Ackman.

Those developments in recent days extend a tumultuous past year for its parent company, UnitedHealth Group, marked by the killing of a top executive, a costly cyberattack against its subsidiary and high medical costs in its insurance arm. UnitedHealth Group is the biggest health-care conglomerate in the U.S. based on revenue and its more than $420 billion market cap, and UnitedHealthcare is the nation’s largest private insurer.

Shares of UnitedHealth Group have tumbled roughly 23% over the last three months.

Some private schools have shut down because of a rapidly escalating measles outbreak in West Texas. Local health departments are overstretched, pausing other important work as they race to limit the spread of this highly contagious virus.

Summary

IRS worker Robert McCabe, a Trump voter, expressed shock after being among 7,000 laid off by DOGE, an initiative under the Trump administration led by Elon Musk.

McCabe stated DOGE is acting like a “wrecking ball and destroying people’s lives for no reason.”

The layoffs, targeting probationary employees with less than a year of service, affect hundreds at the IRS and are part of a broader effort to shrink the federal workforce.

The cuts raise concerns about impacts on tax collection during a critical season.

A new executive order from the Trump Administration commands the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to terminate the Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Long COVID.

I’m going to editorialize a bit here. The DoD was ready to fire every probationary employee today. An AF Lieutenant General came to tears yesterday breaking the news to staff. And this is not just first year employees as the media keeps pointing out- this changed this to two years in 2015 for the DoD. For many excepted employees, it actually takes three years to leave the probationary period. Doing rough math (3 years out of a 30 year career- that’s 10% of that particular population). It took “woke” CNN to point out the law that you can’t just fire ~6% of the workforce without first determining what will break.

Too bad this wasn’t law for the IRS and other agencies.

US President Donald Trump's remark that his country spent $21m to boost voter turnout in India's elections has triggered a political slugfest in the country.

He made the remark days after a team led by Elon Musk said it had cancelled the payout as part of its crackdown on a US agency providing foreign aid.

India's governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) called the payout an "external interference" and accused the opposition Congress party of seeking this intervention.

The Congress denied the allegation, calling Trump's claims "nonsensical". The US has not provided any evidence to support its claim.

In a clip from ESPN sports talkshow Get Up that went viral last week, former National Hockey League player PK Subban weighed in on the differences between the culture in the NHL and NBA. Usually, comparing the two is a game of numbers: revenue, viewers, salaries, that kind of thing. But over the past 10 days, passion has emerged as a differentiator. “You can step on to an NBA floor and go through the motions,” Subban said on ESPN. “You can’t do that in hockey – you can’t. Like, the culture of our sport, you have to play it with passion. You have to be willing to fight. You have to be willing to leave it on the ice. That’s what fans are investing in.”

That investment has paid off most recently with the 4 Nations Face-off tournament, which wrapped up on Thursday night in Boston. The thrilling final between Canada and the US was a rematch of last Saturday’s marquee round-robin clash, a contest marked by three fights in the opening nine seconds. The rest of the game was pretty good, too, ending with a US win. On Thursday, the tables turned. It was Canada that scored first – again – and last. Canada won the game narrowly 3-2, after the US left Connor McDavid, the best player on the planet, open in the slot in sudden-death overtime. He made no mistake.

Yet, at the same time, hockey is one of Canada’s most effective tools of soft power. It would be overstating it to say that the x-factor Subban was talking about – that thing that most agree after watching the 4 Nations Face-off seems to be missing from other North American sports cultures – is Canadians (after all, there are Canadian teams in the NBA, MLB and MLS). But it would not be wrong to suggest that what all those other leagues might lack is Canadian-ness. The tenacity and drive to compete against all odds – to literally fight when called to. This thing that hockey has and others don’t could only have come from up here, somewhere along this northern territory. Trump can try to co-opt hockey into his skewed vision of America, but the reality is that no matter where you’re from, when you step on to the ice, something about you will always be Canadian.

The Trump administration issued an order on 27 January freezing payment on all federal grants and loans, but lawsuits challenging its legality were filed soon after, placing the order on hold. The fact that payments still aren’t going out because Trump’s team has halted grant-review meetings is exploiting a “loophole” in the process...

To further complicate grant-review efforts, the Trump administration laid off more than 1,100 employees at the NIH in the past week, representing about 6% of the agency’s workforce. Many of these workers were programme officers, grant-management specialists and scientific-review officers who help to screen grant applications, conduct grant reviews and perform oversight on the 60,000 funding awards the agency issues each year.

The scientific review officer said he could describe the impact of these layoffs on the agency’s ability to review grant applications and fund research in two words: “We’re fucked.”

This is the first time I've seen scientist swear on an official news interview btw.

Try this link if there is soft paywall: https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00540-2

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/33197558

BBC News - Apple pulls data protection tool after UK government security row

• "In a statement Apple said it was "gravely disappointed" that the security feature would no longer be available to British customers."

Washington post - Apple yanks encrypted storage in U.K. instead of allowing backdoor access