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Video from bystanders showed that Pretti had not attacked officers, as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said immediately after the shooting. Critics raised further complaints after Noem and Homeland Security advisor Stephen Miller both called Pretti a domestic terrorist before an investigation had concluded.

Gallup’s final presidential approval survey was released in December. It put President Donald Trump’s approval rating at 36% — the second consecutive month at that level and the lowest of his second term, according to Gallup. The same survey found just 17% of respondents approved of the job Congress was doing. Approval stood at 24% among Democrats and 29% among Republicans.

Gallup’s exit does not leave a vacuum in presidential polling. Morning Consult, Harvard-Harris, The Wall Street Journal, Economist/YouGov and others continue to track approval and favorability. RealClearPolitics aggregates many of those surveys for comparison.

Ford said the US car maker's tariff costs were $900m (£660m) higher than expected last year because of a last minute change to the Trump administration's tariff relief program.

Chief executive Jim Farley said Ford spent double what it had expected on tariffs in 2025 - roughly $2bn - due to "the unexpected and late year change in tariff credits for auto parts".

Separately, Ford had previously disclosed a $19.5bn hit as a result of its shift away from electric vehicle plans. Those charges also contributed to its fourth-quarter net loss of $11.1bn. The vehicle manufacturer had said it was backing away from plans to make large EVs, citing lacklustre demand and recent regulatory changes under Trump. The business case for leaning heavily into EV production, specifically large-sized EV models, has "eroded", the company had said.

In research released Thursday by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a group of analysts and economists found that in 2025, the average tariff rate on imported goods rose to 13% from just 2.6% at the start of the year. The New York Fed found that 90% of the cost of increased tariffs, which Trump imposed on goods from Mexico, China, Canada and the European Union, was paid for by companies and often passed on to shoppers. "US firms and consumers continue to bear the bulk of the economic burden of the high tariffs imposed in 2025."

The reaction from exporters in 2025 was essentially the same in 2018, when Trump imposed certain tariffs during his first term in office – the cost of goods for consumers rose, with little other economic impact recorded, the New York Fed said at the time.

The Kiel Institute for the World Economy, an independent research firm in Germany, said in a report last month that it had found "near-complete pass-through of tariffs to US import prices." Kiel researchers analysed 25 million transactions and found that in exporting countries like Brazil and India, the price of goods from those countries did not decline. "Trade volumes collapsed instead," the Kiel report said, meaning exporters preferred to cut the amount of goods being shipped into the US rather than lower prices.

The National Bureau of Economic Research also found that the pass-through of tariffs was "almost 100%", meaning the US is paying for the increase in prices, not exporting countries.

Similarly, the Tax Foundation, a Washington DC-based think tank focused on US tax policy, found that increased tariffs on goods in 2025 increased costs for every American household. Defining tariffs as a new tax on consumers, the Tax Foundation said the 2025 increases cost the average household $1,000 (£734.30). In 2026, tariffs will cost the same household $1,300. The Tax Foundation said even the "effective" tariff rate, an average rate that takes into account people buying fewer goods in response to increased prices, is now 9.9%, making it the "the highest average rate since 1946". With such impacts on people, the Tax Foundation said any economic benefits of tax cuts included in Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" will be offset entirely.

Last year the US added an average of just 15,000 jobs a month, very few by historic standards.

Layoffs have remained limited, apart from some high-profile cuts at firms such as Amazon and UPS and the unemployment rate has held steady at around 4.3%. Meanwhile, the wider economy continues to grow, expanding at a robust annual pace of 4.4% in the most recent figures.

Last October the investment bank Goldman Sachs put out a report, which was widely cited, suggesting the US could be facing a new period of "jobless growth" thanks to the arrival of new technology and artificial intelligence (AI) in particular, allowing companies to do more with fewer workers.

Research suggests job losses due to AI have remained concentrated to just a few sectors. And many US firms, especially in tech, still have on their payrolls a glut of workers who were brought on during the pandemic, when there was a small hiring boom. That could also help explain the lack of new vacancies.

Laura Ullrich, director of economic research at Indeed, said in her view another reason hiring appetites took a hit last year was the uncertainty stemming from the Trump administration's cuts to government spending and his programme of tariffs. Assuming the economy remains strong, she does not think the new jobs numbers will stay this low. "I would definitely not call it a new normal, because I don't think it's normal," she said. "I don't think you can sustain the kind of labour market that we're in over the long term. "Having a very low-hire, low-fire, low-quits environment in a period of economic growth can only last so long."

Although this is just an anecdote, I think it happens very widely. Maybe not always as sinister, but certainly far from innocent. Basically we see that these online companies are now paid by engagements (i.e. views, clicks, comments, shares). So they create algorithms that show content to people who are estimated to have higher engagement with content. Why not? People engage with content they like right? And we didn't tell the algorithm to prioritize anything bad - in fact we may even bias the algorithm away from obviously bad content.

Even simple statistical algorithms are very good at predicting what someone is likely to engage with given a modest set of examples from their past online engagements. The more advanced machine learning and AI-based algorithms we have today are unbelievably good at it. The reality is that us humans cannot actually understand how or why these algorithms are prioritizing content, we just know that it generates more engagement. We also don't know what content it will see and how it will react to new types of content.

The companies also tell "creators" that create posts/videos that generate engagement they can make money. People have realized what types of posts and videos get more engagement and they've found that things that make people angry or envious generates more engagement and more money. They figure, it it was against the rules, content moderation or the algorithm won't show it (exactly what the person in this article said). Yet, none of that happens and hate spreads.

Politicians are using the same tactics. They've realized that content that makes people angry or envious will generate engagement with them - and that leads to them being "popular" and ultimately winning elections.

So what can we do? Most of all we should make sure that we're aware that the content online and spoken by politicians is at least in part if not mostly to "engage" us. Remember that what we read and what they say is often meant to provoke us into some response. The wise old saying from my grandmother of Believe none of what you hear and only half of what you see, seems more appropriate than ever.

Why not boycott social media? I think it's harder than it seems. Public companies that we are all invested in share key information on twitter. News sites that are the foundation of an "informed electorate", link to twitter in most articles. Governmental leaders around the world share policy updates on twitter - and twitter requires you to sign-in and share information about yourself in order to see it - so even remaining anonymous isn't an option. Are you going to stop going to YouTube - is there any other video site left? What about Linkedin - who also has a content algorithm that the most popular people work hard to understand and get noticed. So while it sounds nice to just obstain, I think it's less realistic than it seems.

Last summer, the man says, he found himself sitting in his car, analysing trends on TikTok. His day job was conducting viewings for an estate agency but he was trying to come up with an idea for a viral video account that could be run as a money-making side-hustle.

“I was thinking of unique videos I can do for people,” he says on the tape.

That’s when he had a brainwave: “Hate brings views.”

At that time protests outside asylum hotels were spreading across the country. The man says he noticed “far-right people” were among the most engaged on TikTok. They were easy to rile up: “They hate such videos of illegal migrants. I was like, why not?”

He added an AI-generated voiceover about asylum seekers, rapists, and illegal immigrants then pressed upload. The audience response was instant and enormous, and TikTok’s algorithm responded by pushing it into the feeds of hundreds of thousands of people. Irate Londoners drove up engagement by complaining they couldn’t afford such properties while illegal immigrants were supposedly getting them for free.

“It wasn’t racist,” the man says of his account. He argues that if the videos had really been racist, TikTok’s algorithm would have downgraded the content. Instead, he was rewarded with millions of views. He was just an entrepreneur following a simple content strategy: “Every single video I would basically copy paste the same thing. I wrote down ‘illegal migrants’.”

Despite fostering online hatred, the man recorded by Wasserstrum insists he doesn’t personally share the views expressed on his TikTok account. Instead, he suggests his fake anti-migrant house tour videos were just a way to game the algorithm, build an audience, and hopefully make money.

”I didn’t do anything because of hate,” he says on the tape. “I didn’t care. It’s just I wanted the clicks.”

Using a leakage metric we flagged 287 Chrome extensions that exfiltrate browsing history. Those extensions collectively have ~37.4 M installations – roughly 1 % of the global Chrome user base. The actors behind the leaks span the spectrum: Similarweb, Curly Doggo, Offidocs, chinese actors, many smaller obscure data‑brokers, and a mysterious “Big Star Labs” that appears to be an extended arm of Similarweb.

Official MCP Registry (modelcontextprotocol.io)

This repository is a collection of reference implementations for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), as well as references to community-built servers and additional resources.

A federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., declined a request by prosecutors to indict two Democratic U.S. senators, Mark Kelly of Arizona and Michigan’s Elissa Slotkin, on charges of seditious conspiracy

The attempted indictment of Kelly, a former U.S. Navy captain and the former CIA analyst Slotkin related to a video in November that they made with four other Democrats in Congress, on which they reminded members of the U.S. military that they have the right to refuse to follow illegal orders by superiors.

It is extremely unusual for a grand jury to refuse to issue an indictment when a prosecutor seeks one. An indictment is a charging document that a grand jury will issue if jurors agree there is probable cause to believe a crime was committed.

Trump at the time accused them of “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”

“Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL,” Trump wrote on Truth Social then.

Quick and simple way to generate and validate cron expressions.

The historian and moralist, who was otherwise known simply as Lord Acton, expressed this opinion in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887:

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

I've been wondering myself lately: Is AI working for us, or are we working for AI?

What they found across more than 40 “in-depth” interviews was that nobody was pressured at this company. Nobody was told to hit new targets. People just started doing more because the tools made more feel doable. But because they could do these things, work began bleeding into lunch breaks and late evenings. The employees’ to-do lists expanded to fill every hour that AI freed up, and then kept going.

As one engineer told them, “You had thought that maybe, oh, because you could be more productive with AI, then you save some time, you can work less. But then really, you don’t work less. You just work the same amount or even more.”

Over on the tech industry forum Hacker News, one commenter had the same reaction, writing, “I feel this. Since my team has jumped into an AI everything working style, expectations have tripled, stress has tripled and actual productivity has only gone up by maybe 10%. It feels like leadership is putting immense pressure on everyone to prove their investment in AI is worth it and we all feel the pressure to try to show them it is while actually having to work longer hours to do so.”

The researchers’ new findings aren’t entirely novel. A separate trial last summer found experienced developers using AI tools took 19% longer on tasks while believing they were 20% faster. Around the same time, a National Bureau of Economic Research study tracking AI adoption across thousands of workplaces found that productivity gains amounted to just 3% in time savings, with no significant impact on earnings or hours worked in any occupation. Both studies have gotten picked apart.

When it proposed to repeal the finding last year, the EPA also proposed to repeal all climate regulations for cars and trucks along with it. The final repeal is expected to do the same — a massive regulatory rollback in and of itself, as transportation is the largest source of U.S. emissions. Reached for comment, an EPA spokesperson noted that without the endangerment finding, the “EPA would lack statutory authority under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act (CAA) to prescribe standards for certain motor vehicle emissions.”

The Clean Air Act requires the EPA administrator to regulate emissions from vehicles of any pollutant that “in his judgment cause, or contribute to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.” The Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that planet-warming emissions fall under the law’s definition of air pollutants and should be regulated if they’re found to be a threat to public health.

A major supply-chain attack has been uncovered within the ClawHub skill marketplace for OpenClaw bots, involving 341 malicious skills.

For macOS users, the instructions led to glot.io-hosted shell commands that fetched a secondary dropper from attacker-controlled IP addresses such as 91.92.242.30. The final payload, a Mach-O binary, exhibited strong indicators of the AMOS malware family, including encrypted strings, universal architecture (x86_64 and arm64), and ad-hoc code signing. AMOS is sold as a Malware-as-a-Service (MaaS) on Telegram and is capable of stealing:

Keychain passwords and credentials
Cryptocurrency wallet data (60+ wallets supported)
Browser profiles from all major browsers
Telegram sessions
SSH keys and shell history
Files from user directories like Desktop and Documents

The short version: agent gateways that act like OpenClaw are powerful because they have real access to your files, your tools, your browser, your terminals, and often a long-term “memory” file that captures how you think and what you’re building. That combination is exactly what modern infostealers are designed to exploit.

What I found: The top downloaded skill was a malware delivery vehicle

While browsing ClawHub (I won’t link it for obvious reasons), I noticed the top downloaded skill at the time was a “Twitter” skill. It looked normal: description, intended use, an overview, the kind of thing you’d expect to install without a second thought.

But the very first thing it did was introduce a “required dependency” named “openclaw-core,” along with platform-specific install steps. Those steps included convenient links (“here”, “this link”) that appeared to be normal documentation pointers.

They weren’t.

Both links led to malicious infrastructure. The flow was classic staged delivery:

The skill’s overview told you to install a prerequisite.

The link led to a staging page designed to get the agent to run a command.

That command decoded an obfuscated payload and executed it.

The payload fetched a second-stage script.

The script downloaded and ran a binary, including removing macOS quarantine attributes to ensure macOS’s built-in anti-malware system, Gatekeeper, doesn’t scan it.

This is the type of malware that doesn’t just “infect your computer.” It raids everything valuable on that device:

Browser sessions and cookies

Saved credentials and autofill data

Developer tokens and API keys

SSH keys

Cloud credentials

Anything else that can be turned into an account takeover

If you’re the kind of person installing agent skills, you are exactly the kind of person whose machine is worth stealing from.

Duktape is an embeddable Javascript engine, with a focus on portability and compact footprint.

Duktape is easy to integrate into a C/C++ project: add duktape.c, duktape.h, and duk_config.h to your build, and use the Duktape API to call ECMAScript functions from C code and vice versa.