Donald Trump's tariff war occupied US allies for much of last year. Now, President Xi Jinping is welcoming a procession of leaders looking to mend fences with the world's other major economy. South Korea's Lee Jae Myung kicked off the trend this month, cementing an improvement in ties by becoming his nation's first president to visit China since 2019. Canada's Mark Carney followed suit when he arrived late Wednesday, closing a near-decade gap in leader-to-leader diplomacy between Ottawa and Beijing in the Asian nation. Days later, Prime Minister Keir Starmer is set to travel to the Chinese capital to buoy British business, marking a first since 2018. Germany's chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is also expected to visit next month.
A global realignment in higher education is underway, according to the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings 2026. While the University of Oxford holds the top position for the 10th consecutive year, the data reveal a shifting balance of academic power: US institutions are slipping, even as leading universities across Asia continue to climb.
Chinese Progress
MINNEAPOLIS " Federal law enforcement was on scene at North Lyndale Avenue and 25th Avenue Wednesday night after a man was shot in the leg by a federal agent. Developing story.
The U.S. allies hoped meeting senior Trump officials would diffuse tensions and tough talk on Greenland. It didn't.
A website dedicated to naming ICE and Border Patrol employees is coming under a "prolonged and sophisticated" cyber attack after the Daily Beast revealed it planned to make public 4,500 names of federal immigration staff. The founder of ICE List said the website was overwhelmed by malicious web traffic originating in Russia after the Beast reported that a huge cache of personal IDs had been leaked to the site by an alleged Department of Homeland Security whistleblower. The Direct Denial of Service (DDOS) assault, which began on Tuesday evening and is still ongoing at the time of publication, saw a huge number of IPs simultaneously access the website of ICE List, a self-styled "accountability initiative." Read more
Former Rep. RJ May will spend 17 1/2 years in prison for distributing videos of children being sexually abused, a federal judge decided Wednesday. After hearing from a tearful May, members of his family and a statement from one of the children shown in the videos May shared, U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie opted for a slightly lesser sentence than the 20 years federal prosecutors requested but significantly more than the five years the 39-year-old proposed for himself. May, a West Columbia Republican and founding member of the ultra-conservative Freedom Caucus, pleaded guilty in September to sending videos depicting child sexual abuse over a five-day span in April 2024. After his release from prison, May will spend 20 years under supervised release, with federal parole officers monitoring his actions to be sure he doesn't reoffend. He must pay a fee of $58,500 to the children shown in the videos he sent who government officials were able to reach. Read more
Fifteen years ago, Daniel Ek broke into America's digital-content wars with his streaming music start-up, Spotify, which has turned into a publicly traded company with a $110 billion market value. Now he and his business partner, the Swedish entrepreneur Hjalmar Nilsonne, aim to crack a higher-stakes consumer market: American health care.
DHS is weirdly using import/export rules to expand its authority to identify online critics.
President Donald Trump and his top aides' preferred path to the U.S. taking ownership of Greenland is incentivizing people there to vote in a referendum to align with the United States, according to two people familiar with his thinking and granted anonymity to speak candidly.
Donald Trump is said to be "ready to push the button" on military strikes against Iran, after the U.S. and U.K. withdrew personnel from bases in the Middle East.
The U.S. president has been mulling direct action against Iran, amid ongoing and widespread protests in the country calling for an end to the Ayatollah's regime. Trump has warned there would be "hell to pay" if protesters were killed, but has yet to act despite reports of a death toll now topping 2,500.
A Washington source close to the U.S. administration told The Independent that strikes could be carried out within the next 24 hours.
www.cnn.com Even more. Read more
The newly unveiled Chinese system reportedly delivers an impressive 2.6 megawatts of pulsed power with synchronization accuracy previously thought unattainable. Such power output, combined with fine control over timing, marks a breakthrough in how particle beams can be generated and maintained in the vacuum of space.
The funniest thing about the Secret Service decrying James O'Keefe's honeypot sting tactics -- as "targeted and manipulated" is that sources tell me that Secret Service leaders recently launched their own attempted yet failed sting operation to try to uncover my sources within the agency. In a plan authorized by Secret Service Director Sean Curran himself, I'm told agents posed as journalists fishing for derogatory information on the USSS to try to find out who is leaking to me. The effort failed and provided a lesson for most Secret Service sources inside and outside the agency. They know I would go to jail to protect them -- and that I have not and would never give up their identities
As the people of Iran brave another intensifying crackdown by their rulers after another effort to reclaim their basic rights from one of the world's most repressive regimes, my question is: Where are the protests in the West? Specifically, where are all those defenders of persecuted Muslims who have been so active on the streets of New York, London, Sydney, Rome and elsewhere the past two years? Where are the demands for justice and freedom for the downtrodden victims of a brutally repressive state? What is so different about the cause they have been espousing in their demonstrations over Gaza and the cause of the millions of innocent coreligionists 1,000 miles to their east? Those kaffiyeh-wearing, banner-waving, slogan-chanting activists say they were moved to protest, sometimes violently and unlawfully, by the plight of Muslims dispossessed of their lands and livelihoods, immiserated, starved, beaten and murdered by a savage regime.
An unnamed Israeli official also said it appeared Trump had decided to intervene, though the scope and timing remained unclear.
The United States and the United Kingdom are pulling certain personnel from key bases around Iran amid rapidly escalating tensions in the region, sources told Reuters on Wednesday. "All the signals are that a U.S. attack is imminent, but that is also how this administration behaves to keep everyone on their toes. Unpredictability is part of the strategy," a Western military official told Reuters on Wednesday.
