Andrew Ross Sorkin, editor at large of DealBook, describes how leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos remain on edge after President Trump, for now, backed down from threats of using tariffs or military force to gain Greenland.

EBay has updated its User Agreement to explicitly ban third-party "buy for me" agents and AI chatbots from interacting with its platform without permission. From a report: On its face, a one-line terms of service update doesn't seem like major news, but what it implies is more significant: The change reflects the rapid emergence of what some are calling "agentic commerce," a new category of AI tools designed to browse, compare, and purchase products on behalf of users. eBay's updated terms, which go into effect on February 20, 2026, specifically prohibit users from employing "buy-for-me agents, LLM-driven bots, or any end-to-end flow that attempts to place orders without human review" to access eBay's services without the site's permission. The previous version of the agreement contained a general prohibition on robots, spiders, scrapers, and automated data gathering tools but did not mention AI agents or LLMs by name.

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Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach on Thursday tried to ease worries that AI is destroying software business models. From a report: "It's an overblown narrative, and it's not true," he told CNBC's "Squawk Box" from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, calling AI a tailwind and "absolutely not a headwind" for the company. Software stocks have sold off in recent months on concerns that new AI tools will upend the sector and displace longstanding and recurring businesses that once fueled big profits. Workday shares lost 17% last year and have sunk another 15% since the start of 2026.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: An airport made of bamboo? A tower reaching 20 metres high? For many years, bamboo has been mostly known as the favourite food of giant pandas, but a group of engineers say it's time we took it seriously as a building material, too. This week the Institution of Structural Engineers called for architects to be "bamboo-ready" as they published a manual for designing permanent buildings made of the material, in an effort to encourage low-carbon construction and position bamboo as a proper alternative to steel and concrete. Bamboo has already been used for a number of boundary-pushing projects around the world. At Terminal 2 of Kempegowda international airport in Bengaluru, India, bamboo tubes make up the ceiling and pillars. The Ninghai bamboo tower in north-east China, which is more than 20 metres tall, is claimed to be the world's first high-rise building made using engineered bamboo. At the Green School in Bali, a bamboo-made arc serves as the gymnasium and a striking example of how the material is reshaping sustainable architecture. The use of composite bamboo shear walls have proved to be resilient against earthquakes and extreme weather in countries such as Colombia and the Philippines, where sustainable, disaster-resilient housing has been built with locally sourced materials.

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Alex Honnold again will be ascending without ropes. In an interview he considers the impact on his family if something were to go wrong.

The movies competing for the 98th Academy Awards. The ceremony will air on March 15.

Claims that Chinese technology for AI lags the US are a "fairy tale," Arthur Mensch, the chief executive officer of Mistral, said. From a report: "China is not behind the West," Mensch said in an interview on Bloomberg Television at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Thursday. The capabilities of China's open-source technology is "probably stressing the CEOs in the US." The remarks from the boss of one of Europe's leading AI companies diverge from other tech leaders at Davos, who reassured lawmakers and business chiefs that China is behind the cutting edge by months or years.

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In the first year of his second term, President Trump has made sweeping efforts to influence the arts and media in America.

Ariana Grande, Chase Infiniti and Paul Mescal were shut out, but voters made room for Delroy Lindo, Kate Hudson and “F1.”

They can’t guarantee future health, but they can tell you the trajectory you’re on.

The president used a keynote speech at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland to renounce the last vestiges of the liberal democratic order.

The Eighth Circuit granted the Trump administration’s request to block, for the moment, a lower court’s injunction limiting how federal agents interact with protesters in Minnesota.

Here’s a look at the latest forecasts, and how to prepare.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Weight-loss drugs like Ozempic have transformed millions of lives with easily administered treatments and quick results. Now it turns out the dropped pounds may have a surprising perk for airlines, too: lower fuel costs, as slimmer passengers lighten their aircraft's loads. According to a study published last week by Jefferies, a financial services firm, the four largest U.S. carriers -- American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Southwest Airlines and United Airlines -- could together save as much as $580 million per year on fuel thanks to weight-loss drugs, known as GLP-1s. One in eight U.S. adults said they were taking a GLP-1 in a November survey published by KFF, a nonprofit health research group. Fuel is among airlines' largest expenses. The Jefferies study estimates that the four airlines will together consume 16 billion gallons of fuel in 2026 at a total cost of $38.6 billion, nearly 20 percent of their total expenses. The savings from skinnier passengers would amount to just 1.5 percent of fuel costs. But airlines and pilots must scrutinize even the smallest changes to a plane's weight and balance, and a lighter payload means each jet burns less fuel to generate the thrust necessary to fly. Investors could also stand to benefit: The researchers estimated that a 2 percent reduction in aircraft weight could boost earnings per share by about 4 percent. "Please note savings are before any lost snack sales," the Jefferies analysts added.

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The report from the county medical examiner said the detainee, Geraldo Lunas Campos, was asphyxiated and restrained by law enforcement. Federal officials described his death as a suicide.

Adrian Gonzales had faced 29 charges for his actions in the 2022 shooting, in which 19 children were killed by a gunman at Robb Elementary School in Texas.

After President Trump aired his disdain for Europe, its leaders will gather in Brussels Thursday to take stock of what comes next.

alternative_right quotes a report from The Intercept: Federal prosecutors on January 9 charged Aurelio Luis Perez-Lugones, an IT specialist for an unnamed government contractor, with "the offense of unlawful retention of national defense information," according to an FBI affidavit (PDF). The case attracted national attention after federal agents investigating Perez-Lugones searched the home of a Washington Post reporter. But overlooked so far in the media coverage is the fact that a surprising surveillance tool pointed investigators toward Perez-Lugones: an office printer with a photographic memory. News of the investigation broke when the Washington Post reported that investigators seized the work laptop, personal laptop, phone, and smartwatch of journalist Hannah Natanson, who has covered the Trump administration's impact on the federal government and recently wrote about developing more than 1,000 government sources. A Justice Department official told the Post that Perez-Lugones had been messaging Natanson to discuss classified information. The affidavit does not allege that Perez-Lugones disseminated national defense information, only that he unlawfully retained it. The affidavit provides insight into how Perez-Lugones allegedly attempted to exfiltrate information from a Secure Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, and the unexpected way his employer took notice. According to the FBI, Perez-Lugones printed a classified intelligence report, albeit in a roundabout fashion. It's standard for workplace printers to log certain information, such as the names of files they print and the users who printed them. In an apparent attempt to avoid detection, Perez-Lugones, according to the affidavit, took screenshots of classified materials, cropped the screenshots, and pasted them into a Microsoft Word document. By using screenshots instead of text, there would be no record of a classified report printed from the specific workstation. (Depending on the employer's chosen data loss prevention monitoring software, access logs might show a specific user had opened the file and perhaps even tracked whether they took screenshots). Perez-Lugones allegedly gave the file an innocuous name, "Microsoft Word - Document1," that might not stand out if printer logs were later audited. In this case, however, the affidavit reveals that Perez-Lugones's employer could see not only the typical metadata stored by printers, such as file names, file sizes, and time of printing, but it could also view the actual contents of the printed materials -- in this case, prosecutors say, the screenshots themselves. As the affidavit points out, "Perez-Lugones' employer can retrieve records of print activity on classified systems, including copies of printed documents." [...] Aside from attempting to surreptitiously print a document, Perez-Lugones, investigators say, was also seen allegedly opening a classified document and taking notes, looking "back and forth between the screen corresponding the classified system and the notepad, all the while writing on the notepad." The affidavit doesn't state how this observation was made, but it strongly suggests a video surveillance system was also in play.

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In an opinion piece for The Atlantic, senior editor Saahil Desai argues that media outlets are increasingly treating prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi as legitimate signals of reality. The risk, as Desai warns, is a future where news coverage amplifies manipulable betting odds and turns politics, geopolitics, and even tragedy into speculative gambling theater. Here's an excerpt from the report: [...] The problem is that prediction markets are ushering in a world in which news becomes as much about gambling as about the event itself. This kind of thing has already happened to sports, where the language of "parlays" and "covering the spread" has infiltrated every inch of commentary. ESPN partners with DraftKings to bring its odds to SportsCenter and Monday Night Football; CBS Sports has a betting vertical; FanDuel runs its own streaming network. But the stakes of Greenland's future are more consequential than the NFL playoffs. The more that prediction markets are treated like news, especially heading into another election, the more every dip and swing in the odds may end up wildly misleading people about what might happen, or influencing what happens in the real world. Yet it's unclear whether these sites are meaningful predictors of anything. After the Golden Globes, Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan excitedly posted that his site had correctly predicted 26 of 28 winners, which seems impressive -- but Hollywood awards shows are generally predictable. One recent study found that Polymarket's forecasts in the weeks before the 2024 election were not much better than chance. These markets are also manipulable. In 2012, one bettor on the now-defunct prediction market Intrade placed a series of huge wagers on Mitt Romney in the two weeks preceding the election, generating a betting line indicative of a tight race. The bettor did not seem motivated by financial gain, according to two researchers who examined the trades. "More plausibly, this trader could have been attempting to manipulate beliefs about the odds of victory in an attempt to boost fundraising, campaign morale, and turnout," they wrote. The trader lost at least $4 million but might have shaped media attention of the race for less than the price of a prime-time ad, they concluded. [...] The irony of prediction markets is that they are supposed to be a more trustworthy way of gleaning the future than internet clickbait and half-baked punditry, but they risk shredding whatever shared trust we still have left. The suspiciously well-timed bets that one Polymarket user placed right before the capture of Nicolas Maduro may have been just a stroke of phenomenal luck that netted a roughly $400,000 payout. Or maybe someone with inside information was looking for easy money. [...] As Tarek Mansour, Kalshi's CEO, has said, his long-term goal is to "financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion." (Kalshi means "everything" in Arabic.) What could go wrong? As one viral post on X recently put it, "Got a buddy who is praying for world war 3 so he can win $390 on Polymarket." It's a joke. I think.

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President Trump’s announcement appeared to draw the United States back from the possibility of military and economic conflict with American allies over Greenland.