As the U.S. message veered from shared heritage and values to shared interests and back again, Europeans wondered what kind of alliance they were left with.

Manufacturers will no longer get a credit toward vehicle emissions standards by installing engines that automatically stop at red lights.

Some of Washington’s diplomatic outposts in Asia are raising millions for events to mark the 250th independence anniversary. One ambassador offered to sing and dance.

Cord Cutters News reports: In a move that has delighted fans of classic science fiction, Warner Bros. Discovery has begun uploading full episodes of the iconic series Babylon 5 to YouTube, providing free access to the show just as it departs from the ad-supported streaming platform Tubi... Viewers noticed notifications on Tubi indicating that all five seasons would no longer be available after February 10, 2026, effectively removing one of the most accessible free streaming options for the space opera. With this shift, Warner Bros. Discovery appears to be steering the property toward its own digital ecosystem, leveraging YouTube's vast audience to reintroduce the show to both longtime enthusiasts and a new generation. The uploads started with the pilot episode, "The Gathering," which serves as the entry point to the series' intricate universe. This was followed by subsequent episodes such as "Midnight on the Firing Line" and "Soul Hunter," released in sequence to build narrative momentum. [Though episodes 2 and 3 are mis-labeled as #3 and #4...] The strategy involves posting one episode each week, allowing audiences to experience the story at a paced rhythm that mirrors the original broadcast schedule... For Warner Bros. Discovery, this initiative could signal plans to expand the franchise's visibility, especially amid ongoing interest in reboots and spin-offs that have been rumored in recent years. Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski answered questions from Slashdot's readers in 2014. Long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger offers this summary of the show "for those not in the know... In the mid-23rd century, the Earth Alliance space station Babylon Five, located in neutral territory, is a major focal point for political intrigue, racial tensions, and a major war as Earth descends into fascism and cuts off relations with its allies."

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Forecasters said snowfall totals of one to two inches were likely Sunday night, with isolated amounts of up to three inches across New York City, northeastern New Jersey and much of Long Island.

Warner Bros. spent an estimated $80 million on the R-rated romance, directed by Emerald Fennell, not including hefty marketing costs.

Researchers performed genome sequencing scans on 130 people whose fathers were Chernobyl cleanup workers. Comparing the scans to control groups, they found evidence for the first time for "a transgenerational effect" from the father's prolonged exposure to low-dose ionizing radiation. ScienceAlert reports: Rather than picking out new DNA mutations in the next generation, they looked for what are known as clustered de novo mutations (cDNMs): two or more mutations in close proximity, found in the children but not the parents. These would be mutations resulting from breaks in the parental DNA caused by radiation exposure. "We found a significant increase in the cDNM count in offspring of irradiated parents, and a potential association between the dose estimations and the number of cDNMs in the respective offspring," write the researchers in their published paper... This fits with the idea that radiation creates molecules known as reactive oxygen species, which are able to break DNA strands — breaks which can leave behind the clusters described in this study, if repaired imperfectly. The good news is that the risk to health should be relatively small: children of exposed parents weren't found to have any higher risk of disease. This is partly because a lot of the cDNMs likely fall in 'non-coding' DNA, rather than in genes that directly encode proteins.

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Created in 1993, Slackware is considered the oldest Linux distro that's still actively maintained. And more than three decades later... there's a new release! (And there's also a Slackware Live Edition that can run from a DVD or USB stick...) . Slackware's latest version was released way back in 2016, notes the blog It's FOSS: The major highlight of Slackware 15 is the addition of the latest Linux Kernel 5.15 LTS. This is a big jump from Linux Kernel 5.10 LTS that we noticed in the beta release. Interestingly, the Slackware team tested hundreds of Linux Kernel versions before settling on Linux Kernel 5.15.19. The release note mentions... "We finally ended up on kernel version 5.15.19 after Greg Kroah-Hartman confirmed that it would get long-term support until at least October 2023 (and quite probably for longer than that)." In case you are curious, Linux Kernel 5.15 brings in updates like enhanced NTFS driver support and improvements for Intel/AMD processors and Apple's M1 chip. It also adds initial support for Intel 12th gen processors. Overall, with Linux Kernel 5.15 LTS, you should get a good hardware compatibility result for the oldest active Linux distro. Slackware's announcement says "The challenge this time around was to adopt as much of the good stuff out there as we could without changing the character of the operating system. Keep it familiar, but make it modern." And boy did we have our work cut out for us. We adopted privileged access management (PAM) finally, as projects we needed dropped support for pure shadow passwords. We switched from ConsoleKit2 to elogind, making it much easier to support software that targets that Other Init System and bringing us up-to-date with the XDG standards. We added support for PipeWire as an alternate to PulseAudio, and for Wayland sessions in addition to X11. Dropped Qt4 and moved entirely to Qt5. Brought in Rust and Python 3. Added many, many new libraries to the system to help support all the various additions. We've upgraded to two of the finest desktop environments available today: Xfce 4.16, a fast and lightweight but visually appealing and easy to use desktop environment, and the KDE Plasma 5 graphical workspaces environment, version 5.23.5 (the Plasma 25th Anniversary Edition). This also supports running under Wayland or X11. We still love Sendmail, but have moved it into the /extra directory and made Postfix the default mail handler. The old imapd and ipop3d have been retired and replaced by the much more featureful Dovecot IMAP and POP3 server. "As usual, the kernel is provided in two flavors, generic and huge," according to the release notes. "The huge kernel contains enough built-in drivers that in most cases an initrd is not needed to boot the system." If you'd like to support Slackware, there's an official Patreon account. And the release announcement ends with this personal note: Sadly, we lost a couple of good friends during this development cycle and this release is dedicated to them. Erik "alphageek" Jan Tromp passed away in 2020 after a long illness... My old friend Brett Person also passed away in 2020. Without Brett, it's possible that there wouldn't be any Slackware as we know it — he's the one who encouraged me to upload it to FTP back in 1993 and served as Slackware's original beta-tester. He was long considered a co-founder of this project. I knew Brett since the days of the Beggar's Banquet BBS in Fargo back in the 1980's... Gonna miss you too, pal. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader rastos1 for sharing thre news.

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South Carolina’s state legislature is one of 17, mainly in heavily Republican states, that is moving to handcuff state agencies at a moment of tectonic changes in energy, technology and finance.

"A new variation of the fake recruiter campaign from North Korean threat actors is targeting JavaScript and Python developers with cryptocurrency-related tasks," reports the Register. Researchers at software supply-chain security company ReversingLabs say that the threat actor creates fake companies in the blockchain and crypto-trading sectors and publishes job offerings on various platforms, like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Reddit. Developers applying for the job are required to show their skills by running, debugging, and improving a given project. However, the attacker's purpose is to make the applicant run the code... [The campaign involves 192 malicious packages published in the npm and PyPi registries. The packages download a remote access trojan that can exfiltrate files, drop additional payloads, or execute arbitrary commands sent from a command-and-control server.] In one case highlighted in the ReversingLabs report, a package named 'bigmathutils,' with 10,000 downloads, was benign until it reached version 1.1.0, which introduced malicious payloads. Shortly after, the threat actor removed the package, marking it as deprecated, likely to conceal the activity... The RAT checks whether the MetaMask cryptocurrency extension is installed on the victim's browser, a clear indication of its money-stealing goals... ReversingLabs has found multiple variants written in JavaScript, Python, and VBS, showing an intention to cover all possible targets. The campaign has been ongoing since at least May 2025...

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President Trump has engaged in a spree of self-aggrandizement unlike any of his predecessors, fostering a mythologized superhuman persona and making himself the inescapable force at home and around the world.

President Trump called President Isaac Herzog of Israel “disgraceful” because he has not yet pardoned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his corruption trial.

Two astrophysicists at Spain's Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias analyzed data from the James Webb Space Telescope — the most powerful telescope available — on 31 galaxies with an average redshift of 7.3 (when the universe was 700 million years old, according to the standard model). "We found that they are on average ~600 million years old old, according to the comparison with theoretical models based on previous knowledge of nearby galaxies..." "If this result is correct, we would have to think about how it is possible that these massive and luminous galaxies were formed and started to produce stars in a short time. It is a challenge." But "The fact that some of these galaxies might be older than the universe, within some significant confidence level, is even more challenging." The most extreme case is for the galaxy JADES-1050323 with redshift 6.9, which has, according to my calculation, an age incompatible to be younger than the age of the universe (800 million years) within 4.7-sigma (that is, a probability that this happens by chance as statistical fluctuation of one in one million). If this result is confirmed, it would invalidate the standard Lambda-CDM cosmological model. Certainly, such an extraordinary change of paradigm would require further corroboration and other stronger evidence. Anyway, it would be interesting for other researchers to try to explain the Spectral Energy Distribution of JADES-1050323 in standard terms, if they can ... and without introducing unrealistic/impossible models of extinction, as is usually done. The findings are published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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In a podcast interview, former President Barack Obama did not directly address the video posted by Mr. Trump but denounced a “clown show” on social media.

"More than two years after the last major 9.1 release, the Vim project has announced Vim 9.2," reports the blog Linuxiac: A big part of this update focuses on improving Vim9 Script as Vim 9.2 adds support for enums, generic functions, and tuple types. On top of that, you can now use built-in functions as methods, and class handling includes features like protected constructors with _new(). The :defcompile command has also been improved to fully compile methods, which boosts performance and consistency in Vim9 scripts. Insert mode completion now includes fuzzy matching, so you get more flexible suggestions without extra plugins. You can also complete words from registers using CTRL-X CTRL-R. New completeopt flags like nosort and nearest give you more control over how matches are shown. Vim 9.2 also makes diff mode better by improving how differences are lined up and shown, especially in complex cases. Plus on Linux and Unix-like systems, Vim "now adheres to the XDG Base Directory Specification, using $HOME/.config/vim for user configuration," according to the release notes. And Phoronix Mcites more new features: Vim 9.2 features "full support" for Wayland with its UI and clipboard handling. The Wayland support is considered experimental in this release but it should be in good shape overall... Vim 9.2 also brings a new vertical tab panel alternative to the horizontal tab line. The Microsoft Windows GUI for Vim now also has native dark mode support. You can find the new release on Vim's "Download" page.

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On the Strip and beyond, clubs, bars and restaurants spotlight local performers who deliver some of the city’s best entertainment.

This week Apple patched iOS and macOS against what it called "an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals." Security Week reports that the bugs "could be exploited for information exposure, denial-of-service (DoS), arbitrary file write, privilege escalation, network traffic interception, sandbox escape, and code execution." Tracked as CVE-2026-20700, the zero-day flaw is described as a memory corruption issue that could be exploited for arbitrary code execution... The tech giant also noted that the flaw's exploitation is linked to attacks involving CVE-2025-14174 and CVE-2025-43529, two zero-days patched in WebKit in December 2025... The three zero-day bugs were identified by Apple's security team and Google's Threat Analysis Group and their descriptions suggest that they might have been exploited by commercial spyware vendors... Additional information is available on Apple's security updates page. Brian Milbier, deputy CISO at Huntress, tells the Register that the dyld/WebKit patch "closes a door that has been unlocked for over a decade." Thanks to Slashdot reader wiredmikey for sharing the article.

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The war in Ukraine can look like the future and the past at once. But it’s just our present, the only one we know.

"Research published in the World Journal of Men's Health found evidence that drugs such as Viagra and Cialis may also help with heart disease, stroke risk and diabetes," reports the Telegraph, "as well as enlarged prostate and urinary problems." Researchers found evidence that the same mechanism may benefit other organs, including the heart, brain, lungs and urinary system. The paper reviewed a wide range of published studies [and] identified links between PDE5 inhibitor use and improvements in cardiovascular health. Heart conditions were repeatedly cited as an area where improved blood flow and muscle relaxation may offer benefits. Evidence also linked PDE5 inhibitors with reduced stroke risk, likely to be related to improved circulation and vascular function. Diabetes was another condition where associations with improvement were identified... The review also found evidence of benefit for men with an enlarged prostate, a condition that commonly causes urinary symptoms.

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"ChatGPT is getting more social," reports PC Magazine, "with a new feature that allows you to sync your contacts to see if any of your friends are using the chatbot or any other OpenAI product..." It's "completely optional," [OpenAI] says. However, even if you don't opt in, anyone with your number who syncs their contacts are giving OpenAI your digits. "OpenAI may process your phone number if someone you know has your phone number saved in their device's address book and chooses to upload their contacts," the company says... But why would you follow someone on ChatGPT? It lines up with reports, dating back to April, that OpenAI is building a social network. We haven't seen much since then, save for the Sora generative video app, which exists outside of ChatGPT and is more of a novelty. Contact sharing might be the first step toward a much bigger evolution for the world's most popular chatbot. ChatGPT also supports group chats that let up to 20 people discuss and research something using the chatbot. Contact syncing could make it easier to invite people to these chats... [OpenAI] claims it will not store the full data that might appear in your contact list, such as names or email addresses — just phone numbers. However, the company does store the phone numbers in its servers in a coded (or hashed) format. You can also revoke access in your device's settings. 09

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