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.
Elon Musk just announced the merger of his AI startup xAI with SpaceX, forming what’s now the highest-valued private company on the planet at a reported $1.25T — combining his rockets, Grok, and the X platform all under one entity.
The details:xAI will operate as a division within SpaceX, with Musk pitching a vision of launching AI data centers into orbit to overcome Earth’s energy constraints.The merger comes ahead of an anticipated SpaceX IPO later this year, expected to push the company’s valuation to $1.25T.Musk estimated that space-based AI compute will be cheaper than traditional data centers within 2-3 years, powered by near-constant solar energy.
He also said space-based data centers will “enable self-growing bases on the Moon, an entire civilization on Mars… and expansion to the Universe.”
Why it matters: Elon’s tech empire is consolidating fast, calling this merger “the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth.” Data centers in space may sound wild, but Musk isn’t alone in eyeing that solution — and with SpaceX now in the mix, nobody is better positioned to own that opportunity.
The Rundown: Swedish researchers just published results from the largest-scale trial of AI-powered breast cancer screening, finding the technology helps radiologists spot a higher percentage of tumors while cutting radiologist workload nearly in half.
The details:
The two-year study tracked over 100K women to see if AI could catch cancers that traditional screening misses between appointments.The AI analyzed mammograms and flagged high-risk cases for radiologists, boosting the detection rate from 74% to 81% without increasing false positives.Women in the AI group saw 27% fewer aggressive tumor types and 21% fewer large tumors compared to standard screening alone.The system also cut radiologist workload by 44% by handling initial screening, sorting, and freeing doctors to focus on the cases that need the most attention.
Why it matters: Between drug discovery, tumor detection, treatment planning, and more, AI is quickly becoming one of the most impactful tools in the cancer fight. With over 2M breast cancer diagnoses each year, scaling this kind of early detection via AI could be life-changing for women across the globe.
I suggest we round up everyone that ever stepped foot on Epstein’s festering island and return them. Then drop a nuclear bomb on the place. pic.twitter.com/o28N8mVhlF
* He told Epstein that he had finally persuaded Gordon Brown to stand down and leave No 10 five hours before it became wider public knowledge
* He forwarded him an email sent to Gordon Brown disclosing govt was considering selling assets to reduce govt debt. Brown later followed through on the advice
* The same email included sensitive discussions on tax policy – tax relief for businesses, potential flagship electoral pledges on tax
* Mandelson also gave Epstein advance notice of a €500billion bailout of the Eurozone – he emailed him then spoke to him about it on eve of the announcement
* Another email he forwarded looked at how to bolster business lending in wake of financial crisis and included excoriating criticism of Mervyn King
Image source: Lovart / The RundownThe Rundown: 
Image source: Lovart / The Rundown
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