Rights groups criticise deal that could see up to 36,000 people a year held in Italian-run asylum-processing centres.

Scientific-misconduct accusations are leading to retractions of high-profile papers, forcing reckonings within fields and ending professorships, even presidencies. But there’s no telling how widespread errors are in research: As it is, they’re largely brought to light by unpaid volunteers. A program launching this month is hoping to shake up that incentive structure. Backed by 250,000 Swiss francs, or roughly $285,000, in funding from the University of Bern, in Switzerland, it will pay reviewers to root out mistakes in influential papers, beginning with a handful in psychology.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker will include the $10 million ask in his budget proposal for the next fiscal year to erase Illinois residents' $1 billion in medical debt — and the investment would mark the first in a multiyear plan.

Last week, as American sports fans’ eyes moved from football to baseball, a great cry—or at least a significant grumble—was heard from MLB players arriving at spring training: The new uniforms are bad. The MLB announced the uniforms, which have been redesigned by Nike for all of the league’s 30 teams, in a press release last Tuesday. It included praise from some of the biggest baseball names on Nike’s endorsement roster. As images of the uniforms began to circulate, however, a number of other players voiced, shall we say, differing opinions. Many were upset that they’d no longer been given the chance to tailor the fit of their pants. The uniforms are thin and flimsy feeling. Some of the colors seem off. The design elements are poorly spaced and sized, and the lettering for players’ names seems too small. According to The Athletic, some players feel so strongly about the changes that they’ve taken their concerns to their union. The Chicago Cubs shortstop Dansby Swanson, who has an endorsement deal with Nike, has said that he contacted the brand himself to see if some of these concerns could be resolved. It’s hard to dismiss the aesthetic complaints, especially when you compare the new jerseys with those of previous seasons. The new ones look tawdry and a little swagless, like replica jerseys. Fans quickly joined the chorus of outrage. Regular people are the actual primary consumers of pro-sports jerseys, and Nike plans to offer three versions of the new uniforms to buyers, each with varying levels of fidelity to what players wear on field. The two currently available cost $175 and $395. One post on X from the popular MLB-fan account Korked Bats said the jerseys looked like players’ moms had gotten them on clearance at TJ Maxx. The uniforms might bear the Nike logo, but in looking to assign blame, fans have largely seized on what has become a familiar villain in American sports: Fanatics, the sprawling memorabilia conglomerate that manufactured the new uniforms on Nike’s behalf. Over the past couple of decades, Fanatics (with the apparently full support of all of the major American sports leagues) has upended the licensed-sports-merch market and centralized much of the production and sale of team gear under its control. If you’re a fan who wants a T-shirt or cap with your team’s logo, Fanatics has immense power over your options. Complaints about the quality and prices of the products it sells abound.

The landlord behind the largest mass eviction from rent control housing in Los Angeles in 40 years poured more than $1.1 million into city elections in 2022 and has spent $400,000 in the current election cycle. The company’s only prior donation occurred in 2010: $500 to then-Los Angeles City Councilman Paul Koretz. Tenants at Barrington Plaza, a rent-controlled 712-unit Westside apartment complex, and their advocates say that the company backed the election of decision makers who would allow the eviction of tenants from 577 units. The donations came after the landlord met with a city councilmember and raised the possibility of evicting some of its tenants, renovating the property to make it fire safe and later re-renting the apartments, according to two participants in the meeting. Then-Councilmember Mike Bonin said he opposed the idea. One of the complex’s three towers had been badly damaged in a deadly 2020 fire that left eight floors unfit for occupancy.

FTSE 100 company says global instability is making government focus on defence spending

Around 5 a.m. each day, the quiet streets of Sanhe burst to life as the young migrants sleeping outside the labor market awaken to a quick calculation: Do they have enough cash to make it through the day? If they do, they’ll roll over and slip back into sleep. If they don’t, they’ll rush off to the market in search of work, preferably as couriers, construction workers, or security guards. The contracts are entirely verbal and paid out at the end of the day. The newly flush workers are free to roam for a few days — at least until their money runs out and the cycle begins anew. The lives of young migrants to Sanhe, located in the southern megacity of Shenzhen, first attracted public attention around three years ago. Contrary to the conventional image of migrant workers as dreary automatons trapped on factory lines, the so-called Sanhe youth have little interest in formal work. Accustomed to low-quality and low-cost living, their mantra is simple: “Work for a day, party for three.” The most extreme among them, known for their abilities to tolerate near-absolute poverty, are referred as “Sanhe legends.”

A federal judge has affirmed a $5 million arbitration award against MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell.

A statement from the university said they are 'saddened' for patients who are trying to have babies

Agents are said to have visited at least one senior member of the group, sources tell VICE News.

Ksenia Khavana faces up to 20 years in prison for treason amid Kremlin crackdown

The proliferation of generative AI chatbots on extremist platforms could lead to increased radicalization, experts warn.

We thought we knew how Voyager would end. The power would gradually, inevitably, run down. The instruments would shut off, one by one. The signal would get fainter. Eventually either the last instrument would fail for lack of power, or the signal would be lost. We didn’t expect that it would go mad.

ChatGPT appears to have broken, providing users with rambling responses of gibberish. In recent hours, the artificial intelligence tool appears to be answering queries with long and nonsensical messages, talking Spanglish without prompting – as well as worrying users, by suggesting that it is in the room with them.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi claims no U.S. weapons have been used to carry our Israeli atrocities in Gaza since October 7, but the evidence proves otherwise.

The leaked documents supposedly discuss spyware developed by I-Soon, a Chinese infosec company, that’s targeting social media platforms, telecommunications companies, and other organizations worldwide. Researchers suspect the operations are orchestrated by the Chinese government. Unknown individuals allegedly leaked a trove of Chinese government documents on GitHub. The documents reveal how China conducts offensive cyber operations with spyware developed by I-Soon, Taiwanese threat intelligence researcher Azaka Sekai claims. While several researchers have analyzed the supposedly leaked documents, no official confirmation of their veracity exists as of the writing of this article. We have reached out to I-Soon but did not receive a reply before publishing. According to Azaka Sekai, the documents provide an intimate insight into the inner workings of China’s state-sponsored cyber activities. For example, some offensive software has specific features that supposedly allow “obtaining the user’s Twitter email and phone number, real-time monitoring, publishing tweets on their behalf, reading DMs.”

Advocacy group Disability Rights Tennessee has filed a federal lawsuit against three Middle Tennessee youth detention centers, seeking records related to the treatment of children at the facilities, including the use of pepper spray. The complaint names Columbia’s Middle Tennessee Juvenile Detention Center and Waynesboro’s Wayne Halfway House and Hollis Residential Treatment Center. Jason Crews, who serves as the executive director for both MTJDC and Wayne Halfway House, was also named in the suit. Wayne Halfway House owns and operates Hollis Residential Treatment Center and operates MTJDC. A representative for the defendants declined to comment. MTJDC is a privately owned, state-funded facility that takes in minors by court order or referral from the Department of Children’s Services or a county court system. Wayne Halfway House and Hollis Residential Treatment Center aim to “provide quality residential treatment” for juvenile residents so that they may “permanently exit the state custody system and go on to lead successful, independent adult lives.” In recent years, MTJDC has faced scrutiny for its solitary confinement conditions.

The state Supreme Court split, 4-2, Friday on allowing Justice Phil Berger Jr. to take part in next week’s hearing in the 30-year-long education funding dispute commonly known as Leandro. That means all seven justices will take part in oral arguments on Feb. 22. Plaintiffs in the case sought Berger’s recusal because his father is an intervening party in the case as the top officer in the state Senate. The younger Berger rejected a similar recusal request in the Leandro case in August 2022. “Because it offers no new grounds for recusal, plaintiffs’ pending recusal motion amounts to an impermissible challenge to Justice Berger’s denial of their first motion,” according to the new court order signed by Justice Trey Allen. “Under the Recusal Procedure Order, when a Justice rules on a recusal or disqualification motion, ‘[t]hat determination shall be final.’ The motion is therefore dismissed.” The four-page order prompted a nine-page dissent from Justice Allison Riggs, the court’s other Democrat. She focused on the contrast between Berger’s and Earls’ recent responses to recusal requests. “In this instance, Justice Berger has opted for the alternative approach, referring the motion to the entire Court because ‘members of this Court should strive to fortify public trust, and unilateral action in this matter could undermine public confidence.’ In my view, this unnecessary commentary itself undermines public confidence in the Court,” Riggs wrote.

As the high court deliberates, policymakers are preparing for the possibility that they might solve a problem they created in the most punitive way. Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, advocates and policy analysts have warned of a homelessness “tsunami.” It’s the worst-case scenario where the combination of lost income, backlogs of owed rent, and a lack of local government foresight contribute to a surge of people losing housing and ending up on the street. Well, it has arrived—and it’s poised to get much worse as the Supreme Court is set to decide whether to make homelessness a de facto crime. This past month, many cities and counties conducted their annual point-in-time homelessness counts. The results of January’s counts won’t be known for several more months, but they’re likely to be dire. The end-of-2023 results found that approximately 653,000 people were experiencing homelessness. That’s up more than 70,000 over 2022, or a 12 percent increase. In the 12 months since that data was collected, those numbers have likely gone up. But the raw numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. As more people end up experiencing homelessness, they’re also facing increasingly punitive and reactionary responses from local governments and their neighbors. Such policies could become legally codified in short order, with the high court having agreed to hear arguments in Grants Pass v. Johnson.

In California’s struggle to create safer cities, there are those who blame crime on liberal policies aimed at reducing mass incarceration and the imaginary fallout from a police defunding movement that never happened. Robust law enforcement, they claim, is the key to improving public safety. A scathing new study argues this is not true — and hasn’t been for decades. The study comes from the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice and examines crime clearance rates — a key indicator of how well police are doing their jobs — for California between 1990 and 2022. During the past three decades, the percentage of reported violent and property crimes solved by police through an arrest dropped a whopping 41%. During the same three decades, the amount California taxpayers spend to fund law enforcement has risen by a staggering 52%. The numbers only get more concerning from here. The report’s author and senior researcher at CJCJ, Mike Males, told me that over the last 30 years, the number of reported crimes to police has plunged about 50%, so it’s not like police are underperforming because they’re getting swamped in crime reports. Yet, in San Francisco and Alameda County, home to some of the state’s loudest calls for more cops and more police funding, police clearance rates are abysmal. San Francisco’s 6.7% clearance rate, and Alameda County’s 5.8% — which includes the Oakland Police Department’s 1.5% clearance rate — make them some of the worst-performing jurisdictions in California, according to the study.