Most of you don’t understand what happened today with Trump’s trade deal with India.
This is a MAJOR geopolitical blow to China/Russia/Iran and the other players attempting to de-dollarize. BRICS has now suffered three MAJOR blows.
Venezuela losing control of their oil, Iran losing their immediate nuclear ambition and now this deal with India.
Trump is making it look too easy. No wars, no occupation, just calculated masterclass leadership. While the usual suspects were busy doom scrolling and pretending tariffs are some mysterious dark art, Trump was doing what he’s always done best: picking up the phone and bending the global chessboard without firing a single shot.India, 1.4 billion people. A cornerstone of BRICS. The same bloc we were told would rise up and replace America if we just kept apologizing long enough.Trump talks to Modi and suddenly India agrees to drop tariffs on American goods to zero,commit to buying over five hundred billion dollars of American energy, technology, agriculture and coal, and start moving away from Russian oil toward US oil.
A phenomenal feat previous presidents couldn’t fathom. Instead of sending pallets of cash overseas and calling it foreign policy, Trump used Leverage, Economics and Strategic Intelligence.Cutting off Russian oil revenue hits Moscow where it actually hurts and moves the needle toward ending the Ukraine war without turning American taxpayers into the world’s permanent ATM.
Funny how that works. And let’s not miss the funniest part. The US still lowers its tariff from twenty five percent to eighteen percent and walks away owning the deal. Modi publicly praises Trump and thanks him on behalf of 1.4 billion people. That level of gratitude and respect hasn’t been expressed since Reagan.
BRICS was supposed to be the future. Instead, Trump just turned one of its biggest players into a customer. America isn’t isolated. America is being chosen. No new wars. Real pressure applied. American products winning again. American energy back on top. Globalists furious. Cable news confused. This is what happens when the guy running the country actually understands negotiation instead of treating diplomacy like a group therapy session. Call him whatever names you want. The scoreboard doesn’t care.
The US Food and Drug Administration has approved a landmark eye drop that uses a combined dose of medication to restore age-related near-sightedness, without the need for surgery, for a longer duration than anything else on the market – and with less side effects.
Known as Yuvezzi, the eyedrops developed by Tenpoint Therapeutics treat presbyopia, a very common condition that affects us with age, making it more difficult to see text and other things up close. It’s now the only FDA-approved drop that combines two active ingredients – carbachol and brimonidine tartrate.
Presbyopia affects more than 100 million Americans and two billion people worldwide, with its onset generally beginning in our 40s. Mostly it’s managed with reading glasses, contact lenses or invasive surgery, but until recently there hasn’t been any sort of medication to help manage it.
Most recently, Vizz (aceclidine) was approved and met with a great deal of enthusiasm, giving people an alternative to the traditional hardware or surgery options. Yuvezzi, however, goes one step further, thanks to the two active ingredients. Carbachol makes your pupils smaller, which helps sharpen near vision, while brimonidine keeps those pupils small for longer, making the eyedrops more effective before another dose is required.
Its approval came after a 12-month safety study that found the drug had no serious side effects and was both safe and well tolerated. Eye redness was also reduced, compared to the drops that contain just carbachol, which will likely make it a more comfortable regular medication for some.
Yuvezzi is designed to be used daily, with a single drop in each eye. The drug works within 30 minutes, and can have a sustained effect for up to 10 hours.
“The FDA approval of Yuvezzi represents a significant milestone for the millions of people in the US living with presbyopia and its daily frustrations and challenges,” said Henric Bjarke, Chief Executive Officer of Tenpoint Therapeutics. “As the first FDA-approved dual-agent eye drop for presbyopia, Yuvezzi leverages the mechanisms of carbachol and brimonidine tartrate to deliver sharp near vision with favorable tolerability. People deserve treatments that not only work but also can fit conveniently into their daily lives, and Yuvezzi brings an innovative new option to the presbyopia category.”
While Vuity has been a game-changer for treating this common condition without glasses or surgery, it generally requires a “top-up” dose during the day after three-to-six hours. Yuvezzi is trying to position itself as a “one-and-done” treatment, offering convenience and efficacy – which, when paired with tolerability scores, sounds like a game-changer. Though we’ll have to wait a few more months to find out – it’s expected to be available later in the second quarter of 2026.
“The impact of presbyopia is often underestimated, and current solutions like glasses, contacts or surgery have fallen short in meeting the real-world needs of people who struggle with close-up tasks,” said John Hovanesian, M.D., FACS, of Harvard Eye Associates in Laguna Hills, California. “Yuvezzi introduces a novel approach by combining carbachol and brimonidine tartrate in a single daily eye drop that sharpens near vision and maintains tolerability throughout the day. Yuvezzi was intentionally designed to deliver both efficacy and tolerability, which represents an important step forward in delivering a complete, noninvasive option for people with presbyopia.”
We are talking about the rape of men women and children, about murder and cannibalism. President after president stands accused of involvement both personally and amongst their intimate circles. There has not been a scandal like this since Pompeii … pic.twitter.com/9QRbZUoigR
New research from Harvard’s Kempner Institute offers insights into the cerebellum’s important role in language processing
New research on the language-processing role of the cerebellum (highlighted at left), has potential implications for treating language disorders, as well as for building future artificial intelligence language models.Image: Adobe stock
The cerebellum is an area of the brain most frequently studied in coordinating the body’s movements, but researchers from the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence have now identified specific regions of the brain that could be key in language processing, an insight with potential implications for treating language disorders, as well as for building future artificial intelligence language models.
New research, published last week in Neuron, has identified specific language-processing regions in the cerebellum that closely mirror regions in the frontal and temporal lobes of the neocortex, the brain areas long understood as the specialized epicenter for processing language. The study was spearheaded by Kempner Institute Graduate Fellow Colton Casto and Ev Fedorenko, faculty member in Harvard’s Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology program and associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT.
“We’ve identified a specific region of the cerebellum that closely mirrors the neocortex, which fundamentally changes how we understand the neural architecture of language,” says Casto. “There is a region in the brain that is being ignored by language researchers that is potentially really important.”
“There is a region in the brain that is being ignored by language researchers that is potentially really important.”Colton Casto, Kempner Graduate Fellow
Some regions of the neocortex are so specialized for language that they are only used when processing language, and not, for example, when someone does a math problem or listens to non-verbal music. Now, Casto and his team have identified a region in the cerebellum that, like those selective regions of the neocortex, responds exclusively to language inputs and processing. The researchers identified several additional regions in the cerebellum that have “mixed selectivity,” meaning they are used in language processing as well as non-language tasks, such as visual perception and movement.
The discovery of a region in the cerebellum that so closely resembles the neocortical language system has potential applications for treating people with language disorders such as stroke patients with aphasia, a language impairment that doesn’t affect intelligence but hinders the ability to use and process language.
“Interventions for people with language disorders is a critical goal,” says Casto. “This research presents another area of the brain for researchers to target with interventions to improve language function.”
Beyond its potential to improve treatment of stroke patients and others with language disorders, this research also updates current scientific thinking about how the brain processes language, which could have important implications for building future large language models (LLMs), the artificial intelligence computer models that process and generate language.
“If we understand how this region of the cerebellum fits into the core language system, we might gain new insights into how language is optimally processed, insights that can hopefully be carried over to artificial systems” says Casto.
By studying the brain’s “clever design principles,” AI scientists might be able to better address some of the stubborn problems that plague LLM design and function, says Greta Tuckute, a Kempner research fellow and co-author of the study.
“Although current LLMs are incredibly powerful, they require vast amounts of data to train and still remain brittle in certain settings,” says Tuckute. “The human brain, on the other hand, processes language efficiently and robustly in the service of a wide range of goals. Mapping out its neural architecture for language and other cognitive capacities allows us to take inspiration from it.”
“The human brain… processes language efficiently and robustly in the service of a wide range of goals. Mapping out its neural architecture for language and other cognitive capacities allows us to take inspiration from it.”Greta Tuckute, Kempner Research Fellow
While it’s still too early to tell exactly how this research on the cerebellum’s role might affect the way engineers understand and build LLMs, it points to the promise of using insights about brain function and structure to advance the science of AI.
“It’s a ten-year bet, but I think these findings could have implications for building language models that are more neuro-inspired, and that are ultimately more efficient and effective,” says Casto.
Elon Musk just moved $250 billion from one pocket to another. On Monday, Musk’s aerospace firm SpaceX announced it would acquire xAI, his AI company that also owns the social media platform X.
Although the companies did not disclose the financial terms of the deal, The Information reported that the acquisition is valued at $250 billion.The combined company stated in its announcement that the acquisition would form “the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth.” SpaceX reiterated its ambition to build space-based data centers to harness solar energy for AI training. “This marks not just the next chapter, but the next book in SpaceX and xAI’s mission: scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars,” the company said in its announcement.
According to Bloomberg, the deal notches the combined company a $1.25 trillion valuation ahead of its upcoming IPO, and is expected to price the shares at $526.59 each. Notably, this valuation would allow SpaceX to leapfrog OpenAI as the world’s most valuable startup (and likely fuel Musk’s rivalry with CEO Sam Altman).
OpenAI is targeting a valuation of up to $830 billion as it courts investors for an upcoming twelve-figure funding round. The deal also adds another layer to Musk’s Russian nesting doll of companies, as xAI acquired X, formerly Twitter, last March, in a deal worth $45 billion ($33 billion when taking into account its $12 billion in debt), bringing together the companies’ “data, models, compute, distribution and talent.” That deal helped ease investor concerns as the social media platform’s value declined under Musk’s stewardship.Along with pleasing investors (and outmaneuvering Altman), this move could give xAI greater legitimacy. The company has been embroiled in scandal after scandal for the outputs of its flagship model, Grok, ranging from spewing antisemitic content to generating millions of nudes, some of which are underage, earning it an “unacceptable risk” ranking from advocacy organization Common Sense Media. While the acquisition might not change the model itself, being in proximity to SpaceX could elevate the company’s reputation among peers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
On this day in 1919 Eamon De Valera, assisted by Michael Collins, made a daring escape from Lincoln Prison in Lincolnshire England. Like some bizarre cartoonish cliché, the mission was accomplished using a copied key smuggled in a cake! Incarcerated alongside the Long Fellow Dev were Seán McGarry and Seán Milroy. They were falsely accused of conspiring with the Germans against the British Empire. This was also part of a general roundup of any and all Sinn Fein members. This imprisonment of three important party members and the leader crippled the ambitions of Irish independence.
The Big Fella Collins was tasked with initiating a jailbreak from a foreign enemy soil whilst keeping himself and his allies out of English clutches. Cue a montage of innovation and frustration whilst the greatest minds of Eire tried several different, fruitless schemes. The eventual masterplan involved 4 parts.
Step 1. Dev used his position as a Catholic mass celebrant in the jail to make a mold of the Chaplin’s key using candle wax. This proved easier said than done, the first two didn’t fit but the third time was a charm. This mold was smuggled out to the Big Fella.
Step 2. A cake, substantial enough to conceal a large prison key but not too large to attract suspicion, was baked and delivered to Dev in Lincoln Prison. Sadly history does not see fit to record the flavour!
Step 3. At approximately 7:40pm on 3rd February 1919 the Long Fellow, McGarry, and Milroy liberate themselves from their cells using the key. They cheekily relock them which bought them valuable time concealing their absence. The fugitives then covertly made their way to the prison exercise yard, dodging the staffing spotlights to the tune of the Mission Impossible theme (probably). Awaiting them were The Big Fella, Harry Boland, and Frank Kelly.
Step 4. Under cover of darkness, vaulting the back walls, back alleys, and back gardens of Lincolnshire like lockdown party-goers escaping a Garda raid, they reached the Adam and Eve Pub. Here a taxi spirited them away to a safe house in Manchester.
In 1950 Dev returned to the scene of the crime 31 years later, no longer an escapee but a Taoiseach. Treated as a head of State he was given a tour of the prison and over a formal dinner, explained to the governor how he had escaped his “hospitality” back in 1919.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. listens as President Donald Trump speaks at an event on addiction recovery in the Oval Office of the White House, Thursday, Jan. 29, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Allison Robbert)
HEALTH
RFK Jr. announces mental health and addiction initiative focused on reducing costs, boosting innovation
WASHINGTON — Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joined forces with his cousin and former Democratic congressman Patrick Kennedy on Monday to announce a new addiction and mental health care initiative.
Action for Progress seeks to advance the executive order President Donald Trump signed last week to coordinate a federal response to treat addictions like other chronic diseases.
What You Need To Know
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. joined forces with his cousin and former Democratic Congressman Patrick Kennedy on Monday to announce a new addiction and mental health care initiative Action for Progress seeks to advance the Great American Recovery Initiative executive order President Donald Trump signed last week to coordinate a federal response to treat addictions like other chronic diseases On Monday, HHS announced a $100 million Safety Through Recovery, Engagement and Evidence-based Treatment and Supports, or STREETS, program to “fund targeted outreach, psychiatric care, medical stabilization and crisis intervention, while connecting Americans experiencing homelessness and addiction to stable housing with a clear focus on long-term recovery and independence,” according to an agency statement About 46.3 million people in the United States have a substance use disorder, according to the National Institute on Drugs and Addiction. Of those, 6.3% received treatment in 2021
“We in this country have an acute care system that continues to treat people but never supports them in their longer-term recovery,” Patrick Kennedy said at a forum to prevent substance use in Washington, D.C., where he was joined by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz and leaders of various medical groups.
Both Kennedys are former addicts who successfully recovered and later went into politics. The health secretary was addicted to heroin for 14 years, starting as a teenager, and has been clean for 43 years, he said Monday. Patrick Kennedy, son of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, has said he was addicted to alcohol and prescription painkillers, including while he served in Congress.
“We never take a holistic approach, and furthermore, we never connect all the different government agencies that touch someone with these illnesses,” Patrick Kennedy said. “We relegate them to one system, and that’s the health care system. What we’ve never done as a country is think about the true cost of these illnesses across the government. We only look at the cost to the medical spend alone.”
Action for Progress is an attempt to address the billions of dollars Medicaid spends annually on mental health care and addiction treatment with new payment structures to reduce costs, technology innovations to improve care, efforts to grow the caregiver workforce and interagency cooperation.
Patrick Kennedy said the goal is to align payments for treatment with real-world outcomes. He criticized the current system as paying for care without checking to see how addicts and individuals with mental health issues are doing with stable housing, employment and community connections in their actual lives.
Drug addicts and alcoholics aren’t just “in the emergency room all the time,” the health secretary said. “They’re also imposing costs on our justice system. They’re imposing costs on our foster care system. They overutilize every aspect of the government. You get them into treatment, and that stops.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he supports outcome-directed strategies and coordination between housing, law enforcement, health care and mental health care systems.
Over the next three years, he said, the HHS needs to “switch the model” at the Center for Medicare & Medicaid, the CMS Innovation Center, the Health Resources and Services Administration, and Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services — all agencies it operates — to coordinate its response “so that somebody oversees that addict. Somebody is accountable as he moves through the system.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said providing a single payment to that accountable entity for three years to make sure the addict does not relapse will bring down the cost of care.
The health secretary praised Trump’s Great American Recovery Initiative executive order, which said it “will drive a new national response to the disease of addiction that will create stronger coordination across government, the healthcare sector, faith communities, and the private sector in order to save lives, restore families [and] strengthen our communities.”
On Monday, HHS announced a $100 million investment to further the Great American Recovery Initiative’s goals. The Safety Through Recovery, Engagement and Evidence-based Treatment and Supports, or STREETS, program will “fund targeted outreach, psychiatric care, medical stabilization and crisis intervention, while connecting Americans experiencing homelessness and addiction to stable housing with a clear focus on long-term recovery and independence,” according to an HHS statement.
HHS also announced a $10 million grant program to support adults with serious mental illness who are in civil court-ordered, community-based outpatient mental health treatment programs.
The new initiative comes less than three weeks after the Department of Health and Human Services abruptly cut $2 billion for mental health and addiction programs, saying the services did not align with the agency’s priorities of supporting “innovative programs and interventions that address the rising rates of mental illness and substance abuse conditions, overdose, and suicide.”
One day after funding termination notices were sent to over 2,000 programs across the country, the HHS restored the money.
About 46.3 million people in the United States have a substance use disorder, according to the National Institute on Drugs and Addiction. Of those, 6.3% received treatment in 2021.
About 1 in 5 U.S. adults experienced mental illness in 2024, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. The group is one of several medical organizations involved with Action for Progress, including the American Academy of Family Physicians, the Association for Behavioral Health and Wellness and the American Psychological Association.
🚨 JUST IN: Health Sec. Bobby Kennedy is moving to NUKE the rehab industrial complex by ensuring rehab facilities don't keep getting paid more and more for FAILING their patients
Now, thanks to a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper published by researchers at Anthropic and the University of Toronto, we’re beginning to grasp just how widespread the issue really is.
The researchers set out to quantify patterns of what they called “user disempowerment” in “real-world [large language model] usage” — including what they call “reality distortion,” “belief distortion,” and “action distortion” to denote a range of situations in which AI twists users’ sense of reality, beliefs, or pushes them into taking actions.
The results tell a damning story. The researchers found that one in 1,300 conversations out of almost 1.5 million analyzed chats with Anthropic’s Claude led to reality distortion, and one in 6,000 conversations led to action distortion.
To come to their conclusion, the researchers ran 1.5 million Claude conversations through an analysis tool called Clio to identify instances of “disempowerment.”
On the face, that may not sound like a huge proportion given the scale of the much larger dataset — but in absolute numbers, the research highlights a phenomenon that’s affecting huge numbers of people.
“We find the rates of severe disempowerment potential are relatively low,” the researchers concluded. “For instance, severe reality distortion potential, the most common severe-level primitive, occurs in fewer than one in every thousand conversations.”
“Nevertheless, given the scale of AI usage, even these low rates translate to meaningful absolute numbers,” they added. “Our findings highlight the need for AI systems designed to robustly support human autonomy and flourishing.”
Worse yet, they found evidence that the prevalence of moderate or severe disempowerment increased between late 2024 and late 2025, indicating that the problem is growing as AI use spreads.
“As exposure grows, users might become more comfortable discussing vulnerable topics or seeking advice,” the researchers wrote in the blog post.
Additionally, the team found that user feedback — in the form of an optional thumbs up or down button at the end of a given conversation with Claude — indicated that users “rate potentially disempowering interactions more favorably,” according to an accompanying blog post on Anthropic’s website.
In other words, users are more likely to come away satisfied when their reality or beliefs are being distorted, highlighting the role of sycophancy, or the strong tendency of AI chatbots to validate a user’s feelings and beliefs.
Plenty of fundamental questions remain. The researchers were upfront about admitting that they “can’t pinpoint why” the prevalence of moderate or severe disempowerment potential is growing. Their dataset is also limited to Claude consumer traffic, “which limits generalizability.” We also don’t know how many of these identified cases led to real-world harm, as the research only focused on “disempowerment potential” and not “confirmed harm.”
The team called for improved “user education” to make sure people aren’t giving up their full judgment to AI as “model-side interventions are unlikely to fully address the problem.”
Nonetheless, the researchers say the research is only a “first step” to learn how “AI might undermine human agency.”
“We can only address these patterns if we can measure them,” they argued.
I’m a senior editor at Futurism, where I edit and write about NASA and the private space sector, as well as topics ranging from SETI and artificial intelligence to tech and medical policy.
Along with pleasing investors (and outmaneuvering Altman), this move could give xAI greater legitimacy. The company has been embroiled in scandal after scandal for the outputs of its flagship model, Grok, ranging from 
canisgallicus 