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Virginia Senate President Pro Tempore Louise Lucas delivered a profanity-laden retort to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, amid a tense redistricting fight, arguing that Democrats had "f---ing finished" what she views as gerrymandering started by Republicans. On Friday, Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger , a Democrat, signed a bill that would allow voters to weigh in on multiple amendments, including one that would allow for a mid-decade redrawing of the state's congressional districts. Virginia lawmakers are aiming to put the amendments before the people on April 21, 2026, months before the midterm federal elections. " Virginia voters deserve the opportunity to respond to the nationwide attacks on our rights, freedoms, and elections. Everyone deserves the freedom to marry who they love — and Virginia’s Constitution should affirm that all families are welcome in our Commonwealth. Women in Virginia deserve the freedom to make their own reproductive healthcare decisions without...

David Yaffe-Bellany / New York Times : Trump-linked World Liberty Financial's stablecoin, USD1, hit $5B in total circulation in January with 85% held in Binance accounts; Trump pardoned CZ in October   —  Ties between the exchange and the president's company, World Liberty Financial, have only strengthened since the president pardoned Binance's founder, Changpeng Zhao.

House Oversight Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., announced Friday that he's investigating companies linked to Ilhan Omar's, D-Minn., husband, citing a dramatic increase in value in a short time and raising questions about whether their success could be tied to widespread fraud schemes uncovered in Minnesota.  In a letter published Friday morning, Comer said the Oversight Committee would conduct a closer look at the ventures of Tim Mynett, who married Omar in March 2020. "We want to know: who’s funding this? And who’s buying access?" Comer said. In his letter, Comer described how two of Mynett's companies, eStCru LL. and Rose Lake Capital LL., went from being worth $51,000 in 2023 to up to $30 million in 2024. "Given that these companies do not publicly list their investors or where their money comes from, this sudden jump in values raises concerns that unknown individuals may be investing to gain influence with your wife," Comer wrote in his letter to...

Tim Bradshaw / Financial Times : Crypto.com co-founder Kris Marszalek buys the domain AI.com for $70M, the highest disclosed price for a domain name, as he plans a site offering an AI agent   —  Kris Marszalek plans to launch new site with a Super Bowl ad this weekend  —  The founder of cryptocurrency trading site Crypto.com …

Lucas Ropek / TechCrunch : Anthropic says Opus 4.6 adds “agent teams” that can split larger tasks into segmented jobs and integrates Claude directly into PowerPoint via a side panel   —  On Thursday, Anthropic released the latest version of Opus — its most advanced model and a particularly important model for Claude Code.

Rep. Maxine Waters , D-Calif., and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent clashed on Wednesday over President Donald Trump's economic agenda, with the irate congresswoman asking at one point if someone could "shut him up." The fiery exchange occurred during Bessent's testimony before the House Financial Services Committee. Waters, the committee ranking member, posed a series of questions about the inflationary impact of Trump's tariffs on American consumers — and demanded a yes-or-no answer. TRUMP’S ECONOMIC WINS ARE REAL — NOW HE NEEDS TO CONVINCE THE COUNTRY Waters: So I ask you, Secretary Bessent, will you be the voice of reason in this administration and urge President Trump to stop waging a war on American consumers, harming housing affordability, and putting the economy at risk? Yes or no. You don’t have to explain. Bessent: Representative— Waters: Will you be the voice of reason? Will you be the voice of reason? Bessent: A study from Wharton University ...

Tom Warren / The Verge : GitHub integrates Claude and Codex AI coding agents directly into GitHub, GitHub Mobile, and Visual Studio Code, for Copilot Pro Plus and Enterprise users   —  Microsoft-owned GitHub continues to embrace OpenAI and Anthropic AI advances. … GitHub is making Claude by Anthropic …

Alex Kantrowitz / Big Technology : Apptopia: ChatGPT's US market share fell from 69.1% to 45.3% between Jan. 2025 and Jan. 2026; Gemini rose from 14.7% to 25.1%, Grok rose from 1.6% to 15.2%   —  Google, Grok are gaining ground on ChatGPT as the chatbot market expands.  —  ∙ Paid  —  OpenAI's rivals are cutting into ChatGPT's lead.

Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer : Mozilla says Firefox users will be able to disable all AI features in its desktop browser, starting with Firefox 148, rolling out on February 24   —  In response to user feedback on AI integration, Mozilla announced today that the next Firefox release will let users disable AI features entirely or manage them individually.

A federal judge on Monday temporarily lifted restrictions from the Department of Homeland Security that limited lawmakers’ visits to immigration detention facilities. U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb in Washington, D.C., justified a temporary restraining order on the policy by concluding that ICE likely violated funding restrictions and that its policy causes irreparable harm. The judge’s order stated that the court previously found that the DHS policy requiring advance notice for congressional  oversight visits to ICE detention facilities "imposes irreparable harm" on lawmakers, "denying them the ability to carry out timely oversight of covered facilities." "If anything, the strength of that finding has become greater over the intervening weeks, given that ICE’s enforcement and detention practices have become the focus of intense national and congressional interest," the order stated. "And as before, the public interest and the balance of equitable ...

David Gewirtz / ZDNET : OpenAI launches a Codex app for macOS, designed to serve as a command center for managing AI agents, and says Codex usage has nearly doubled since mid-December   —  ZDNET's key takeaways  — OpenAI launches a Mac-only Codex app as an agent command center.

James O'Donnell / MIT Technology Review : Researchers detail how AI tools for generating deepfakes proliferated on Civitai before it banned them in 2025; many tools submitted before the ban remain live   —  Civitai—an online marketplace for buying and selling AI-generated content, backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz …

At 12:01 a.m. ET on Friday, the federal government entered its first shutdown of the new year,  Shutdowns aren't a new phenomenon in Washington, D.C., but they've slowed in their frequency since the turn of the century. Even so, rising partisan rancor, energized political bases and congressional gridlock have contributed to longer, more disruptive shutdowns in recent decades. SENATE REPUBLICANS PUSH FOR HOUSE GOP REBELLION AGAINST FUNDING PACKAGE, VOTER ID LEGISLATION Since 1976, the U.S. government has experienced 22 shutdowns. All shutdowns are unique in why they happen, and typically, the party that thrusts the government into a closure doesn't win the policy dispute at its core.  The most recent one, the longest in U.S. history , happened because of a funding dispute over Obamacare enhanced premium subsidies. Senate Democrats, led by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer , D-N.Y., demanded that Republicans negotiate or outright extend the subsidies, which eventually...

President Donald Trump has threatened legal action against author Michael Wolff and the estate of Jeffrey Epstein, insisting a newly released trove of Epstein-related files clears him of wrongdoing. Trump was aboard Air Force One during a flight to Palm Beach, Florida, on Saturday when he responded to a reporter’s question about the more than 3 million Epstein-related records and personal emails that the Justice Department released Friday. "It looked like this guy, Wolff, was a writer, was conspiring with Epstein to do harm to me," Trump said. "I didn’t see it myself, but I was told by some very important people that not only does it absolve me, it's the opposite of what people were hoping, you know, the radical left, that Wolff, who's a third-rate writer, was conspiring with Jeffrey Epstein to hurt me, politically or otherwise, and that came through loud and clear." Trump said there was a high likelihood that he would sue Wolff and the Epstein estate ...

Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch : India proposes zero taxes for foreign cloud providers through 2047 on services sold outside the country as long as they run workloads from Indian data centers   —  As the global race to build AI infrastructure accelerates, India has offered foreign cloud providers zero taxes through 2047 …