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Ghislaine Maxwell to testify before US Congress in Epstein probe

Ghislaine Maxwell, the jailed associate of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, has agreed to testify under oath before the congressional committee investigating the federal government’s handling of the Epstein cases.

Committee chairman James Comer, who is leading the investigation, says Maxwell will depose virtually on 9 February.

Maxwell’s legal team has previously said she would decline to answer questions under her constitutional right to remain silent unless she is granted legal immunity.

Comer, previewing the deposition, said, “her lawyers have been saying she is going to plead the Fifth,” referring to the US Fifth Amendment right to decline to speak to authorities.

The announcement from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee comes as the Trump administration continues to come under fierce scrutiny for its handling of the Epstein case.

Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for recruiting and trafficking teenage girls for sexual abuse by Epstein.

In July, the committee declined to offer Maxwell legal immunity in exchange for her testimony.

In August, the committee issued legal summons to Maxwell, requiring her to submit evidence under oath.

Maxwell’s legal team said that requiring her to both testify from jail, and without any legal immunity, were “non-starters”.

The lawyers said she “cannot risk further criminal exposure in a politically charged environment without formal immunity” as speaking from prison “creates real security risks and undermines the integrity of the process”.

House lawmakers cannot force Maxwell to waive her Fifth Amendment protections.

On Tuesday, Maxwell’s legal team said in a letter to the committee that she would continue to refuse to testify.

“Put plainly, proceeding under these circumstances would serve no other purpose than pure political theater and a complete waste of taxpayer monies,” the attorneys wrote. “The Committee would obtain no testimony, no answers, and no new facts.”

Maxwell, who was convicted in 2021, had appealed against the conviction to the Supreme Court last October but the top court declined to hear the former British socialite’s appeal.

Her only route to leave prison early would be a presidential pardon, unless she is able to persuade a federal judge in New York to vacate or amend her sentence. The White House has denied that Trump is considering granting her clemency, however, Trump has also said he has not ruled it out.

Separately, the Department of Justice faced a deadline of 19 December last year to release all remaining Epstein files in their possession. So far only a fraction of them have been made public.

The department has faced criticism from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle over the number of redactions in the files, which the law permits only to protect victims’ identities and active criminal investigations.

Meanwhile, the House committee is also meeting to discuss former President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary Clinton’s refusal to appear before the panel to answer questions related to the investigation into Epstein.

The committee has said it is considering filing contempt charges against the two.

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2.6 million-year-old jaw from extinct ‘Nutcracker Man’ is found where we didn’t expect it

Fragments of a 2.6 million-year-old fossil jaw discovered in northeastern Ethiopia are transforming the picture of early human evolution in Africa. The jaw, from a bipedal hominin — an extinct relative of humans — shows that its kind journeyed far north, to a region where other hominins were already living.

The ancient jaw belongs to the genus Paranthropus and was found more than 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) farther north than any other fossil of its kind.

“Until now, not a single fossil of Paranthropus had been identified” in the Afar region of Ethiopia, researchers wrote in a study published Wednesday (Jan. 21) in the journal Nature. “Hundreds of fossils representing over a dozen species” of hominins had been found in the Afar, study lead author Zeresenay Alemseged, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Chicago, said in a statement, “so the apparent absence of Paranthropus was conspicuous and puzzling to paleoanthropologists, many of whom had concluded the genus simply never ventured that far north.”

The genus Paranthropus contains three species distantly related to humans: P. robustus, P. boisei and P. aethiopicus, collectively known as the “robusts.” These species walked upright beginning around 2.7 million years ago, but they are unique in having massive teeth and jaws, which earned one fossil skull the nickname “Nutcracker Man.” Paranthropus fossils were previously found in locations from southern Ethiopia to southern Africa and have been dated to between 2.8 million and 1.4 million years ago.

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Immigration officers assert sweeping power to enter homes without a judge’s warrant, memo says

Federal immigration officers are asserting sweeping power to forcibly enter people’s homes without a judge’s warrant, according to an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo obtained by The Associated Press, marking a sharp reversal of longstanding guidance meant to respect constitutional limits on government searches.

The memo authorizes ICE officers to use force to enter a residence based solely on a more narrow administrative warrant to arrest someone with a final order of removal, a move that advocates say collides with Fourth Amendment protections and upends years of advice given to immigrant communities.

The shift comes as the Trump administration dramatically expands immigration arrests nationwide, deploying thousands of officers under a mass deportation campaign that is already reshaping enforcement tactics in cities such as Minneapolis.

For years, immigrant advocates, legal aid groups and local governments have urged people not to open their doors to immigration agents unless they are shown a warrant signed by a judge. That guidance is rooted in Supreme Court rulings that generally prohibit law enforcement from entering a home without judicial approval. The ICE directive directly undercuts that advice at a time when arrests are accelerating under the administration’s immigration crackdown.

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Rock art from at least 67,800 years ago in Sulawesi

The Indonesian archipelago is host to some of the earliest known rock art in the world1,2,3,4,5. Previously, secure Pleistocene dates were reported for figurative cave art and stencils of human hands in two areas in Indonesia—the Maros-Pangkep karsts in the southwestern peninsula of the island of Sulawesi1,3,4,5 and the Sangkulirang-Mangkalihat region of eastern Kalimantan, Borneo2. Here we describe a series of early dated rock art motifs from the southeastern portion of Sulawesi. Among this assemblage of Pleistocene (and possibly more recent) motifs, laser-ablation U-series (LA-U-series) dating of calcite overlying a hand stencil from Liang Metanduno on Muna Island yielded a U-series date of 71.6 ± 3.8 thousand years ago (ka), providing a minimum-age constraint of 67.8 ka for the underlying motif. The Muna minimum (67.8 ± 3.8 ka) exceeds the published minimum for rock art in Maros-Pangkep by 16.6 thousand years (kyr) (ref. 5) and is 1.1 kyr greater than the published minimum for a hand stencil from Spain attributed to Neanderthals6, which until now represented the oldest demonstrated minimum-age constraint for cave art worldwide. Moreover, the presence of this extremely old art in Sulawesi suggests that the initial peopling of Sahul about 65 ka7 involved maritime journeys between Borneo and Papua, a region that remains poorly explored from an archaeological perspective.

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‘Dark Money’ Anti-Marijuana Group Is Bankrolling Ballot Measures To Roll Back Legalization In Multiple States, Records Show

When it comes to putting a proposed new law before voters, it helps to have lots of money ready to burn.

More than $11 million has already changed hands to advance or oppose a potentially record-breaking field of ballot questions that Massachusetts voters could decide in November, according to newly filed campaign finance reports, including a significant injection by a national dark-money group that opposes legal drug use.

All $1.55 million raised so far in support of a proposal to recriminalize recreational marijuana in Massachusetts came from SAM Action Inc., an organization that is not required to disclose the source of its own funding.

It’s the same organization that bankrolled opposition to a 2024 Massachusetts ballot question that sought to open up access to some psychedelic substances, which voters rejected.

Massachusetts is not alone as a battleground, either. SAM Action is also the only donor behind a ballot question in Maine this cycle that would similarly prohibit recreational pot use there, as the Portland Press Herald reported.

Both campaigns have generated scrutiny over their efforts to gather signatures from voters.

In Massachusetts, opponents filed an objection alleging the campaign “obtained signatures fraudulently” by telling voters the measure would provide affordable housing or fund public parks, not that it would ban recreational marijuana.

The State Ballot Law Commission heard arguments last week and is expected to rule by Friday. State law empowers the panel to determine whether signatures were placed on a ballot question petition “by fraud,” and its interpretation could set off a lengthier court battle over whether the question can go before voters.

Similarly, Mainers have been alleging in recent weeks that they were misled about what the anti-marijuana petition would do when they signed it. Maine’s secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, said she’s received complaints about the topic, adding that she has no enforcement power because, as she put it to lawmakers, “You have a right to lie under the First Amendment.”

Wendy Wakeman, a veteran Republican operative who is working as spokesperson for the repeal campaign, said the Massachusetts and Maine questions are “not a coordinated effort” despite funding coming from the same national group.

SAM Action is a 501(c)(4) organization, so it’s not required to disclose its donors, leaving unclear exactly who is putting major dollars toward shutting down an industry both Massachusetts and Maine voted nearly a decade ago to legalize.

On its website, SAM Action claims affiliation with the nonprofit Smart Approaches to Marijuana group co-founded by former US Rep. Patrick Kennedy—a Democrat who represented Rhode Island, and the son of longtime US Sen. Ted Kennedy—along with former White House Office of National Drug Control Policy advisor Kevin Sabet and David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush who is now a senior editor at The Atlantic.

Wakeman declined to comment on SAM Action’s primary donors.

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The earliest elephant-bone tool from Europe: An unexpected raw material for precision knapping of Acheulean handaxes

Organic knapping tools made from bone, antler, and wood were essential to early human toolkits but are rarely preserved in the archeological record. The earliest known soft hammers, dating to ~480,000 years ago, come from Boxgrove (UK), where modified antlers and large mammal bones were used alongside flint hard hammers. These tools facilitated complex knapping techniques, such as platform preparation and tranchet flake removal, contributing to the production of finely worked ovate handaxes typical of the Boxgrove Acheulean industry. This study presents a cortical bone fragment from an elephant, deliberately shaped into a percussor for resharpening flint tools. It represents the earliest known use of elephant bone in Europe and the first documented case of its use as a knapping hammer. Reconstructing its life history offers further insights into Middle Pleistocene hominin technological adaptations, resourcefulness, and survival strategies that enabled humans to endure harsh northern environments.

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Congress Revives Kids Off Social Media Act, a “Child Safety” Bill Poised to Expand Online Digital ID Checks

Congress is once again positioning itself as the protector of children online, reviving the Kids Off Social Media Act (KOSMA) in a new round of hearings on technology and youth.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

Introduced by Senators Ted Cruz and Brian Schatz, the bill surfaced again during a Senate Commerce Committee session examining the effects of screen time and social media on mental health.

Cruz warned that a “phone-based childhood” has left many kids “lost in the virtual world,” pointing to studies linking heavy screen use to anxiety, depression, and social isolation.

KOSMA’s key provisions would ban social media accounts for anyone under 13 and restrict recommendation algorithms for teens aged 13 to 17.

Pushers of the plan say it would “empower parents” and “hold Big Tech accountable,” but in reality, it shifts control away from families and toward corporate compliance systems.

The bill’s structure leaves companies legally responsible for determining users’ ages, even though it does not directly require age verification.

The legal wording is crucial. KOSMA compels platforms to delete accounts if they have “actual knowledge” or what can be “fairly implied” as knowledge that a user is under 13.

That open-ended standard puts enormous pressure on companies to avoid errors.

The most predictable outcome is a move toward mandatory age verification systems, where users must confirm their age or identity to access social platforms. In effect, KOSMA would link access to everyday online life to a form of digital ID.

That system would not only affect children. It would reach everyone. To prove compliance, companies could require users to submit documents such as driver’s licenses, facial scans, or other biometric data.

The infrastructure needed to verify ages at scale looks almost identical to the infrastructure needed for national digital identity systems. Once built, those systems rarely stay limited to a single use. A measure framed as protecting kids could easily become the foundation for a broader identity-based internet.

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Superconductivity Breakthrough Brings Practical Use Closer than Ever, as Team Unveils “Hidden Magnetic Order in the Pseudogap”

In the quest for room-temperature superconductivity, an international team of physicists has uncovered a link between magnetism and the mysterious phase of matter known as the pseudogap, which may finally yield clues to achieving superconductivity above frigid, artificial temperatures.

Given the artificially cold temperatures on which current superconducting technologies rely, making their use impractical for many applications, the search for new room-temperature superconducting materials is a major goal of applied physics research.

Now, physicists from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany and the Center for Computational Quantum Physics (CCQ) at the Simons Foundation’s Flatiron Institute in New York City are potentially helping to advance scientists closer than ever to superconducting at practical temperatures, as reported in a recent paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Superconductors

Superconductors are materials that allow electrical current to flow without resistance. However, even in superconducting materials, the property only becomes active below a threshold temperature. This limits technological applications, as the materials require bulky cooling apparatus to maintain the desired temperatures, which are well below typical room temperatures.

Despite the volume of research involving superconductivity, in many ways it remains poorly understood, awaiting insights that will enable the next generation of quantum computing and other applications.

Some superconductors operate at what are considered “high temperatures,” although, in practical terms, these are still well below typical room temperatures and usually only slightly above absolute zero. What is interesting about those materials, however, is that they tend to exhibit a “pseudogap state” in which electrons begin to behave strangely as they transition to a superconducting state.

Understanding how this state leads to superconductivity could be essential to revealing the mechanisms at play and then applying them to produce room-temperature superconductors.

Testing the Pseudogap

Advancing toward resolving this long-standing issue, researchers used a quantum simulator set slightly above absolute zero to monitor electron spins. They identified that the up or down spins of electrons were influenced by their neighbors in a universal pattern.

At the center of the team’s work was the Fermi-Hubbard model, which describes electron interactions in a solid. The research team’s simulations successfully recreated this model, rather than a real-world material, using lithium atoms in an optical lattice of laser light at temperatures on the order of billionths of a degree above absolute zero. Simulations allowed the researchers a level of precision control impossible in real-world experiments.

When materials host an unaltered amount of electrons, they spin in an alternating pattern called antiferromagnetism. Through a process called “doping,” electrons can be removed, disrupting the magnetic order in a way that physicists had long assumed was permanent. Yet in the new observations, the team discovered a hidden layer of organization present beneath the seeming chaos at very low temperatures.

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TSA Proposes MyTSA PreCheck Digital ID, Integrating Biometrics and Federal Databases

The Transportation Security Administration is reshaping how it verifies the identities of US air travelers, proposing a major update that merges biometric data, mobile credentials, and government authentication platforms into one expanded framework.

Published in the Federal Register, the notice outlines a new form of digital identification, the MyTSA PreCheck ID, which would extend the agency’s existing PreCheck program into a mobile environment requiring more detailed data from participants.

Under the plan, travelers who want to activate the new digital ID on their phones would have to provide additional biographic and biometric details such as fingerprints and facial imagery, along with the information already collected for PreCheck enrollment.

The proposal appears alongside TSA’s recently finalized ConfirmID program, a separate fee-based service designed for passengers who arrive at checkpoints without a REAL ID or another approved credential.

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This 1996 Law Protects Free Speech Online. Does It Apply to AI Too?

We can thank Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act for much of our freedom to communicate online. It enabled the rise of search engines, social media, and countless platforms that make our modern internet a thriving marketplace of all sorts of speech.

Its first 26 words have been vital, if controversial, for protecting online platforms from liability for users’ posts: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” If I defame someone on Facebook, I’m responsible—not Meta. If a neo-Nazi group posts threats on its website, it’s the Nazis, not the domain registrar or hosting service, who could wind up in court.

How Section 230 should apply to generative AI, however, remains a hotly debated issue.

With AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, the “information content provider” is the chatbot. It’s the speaker. So the AI—and the company behind it—would not be protected by Section 230, right?

Section 230 co-author former Rep. Chris Cox (R–Calif.) agrees. “To be entitled to immunity, a provider of an interactive computer service must not have contributed to the creation or development of the content at issue,” Cox told The Washington Post in 2023. “So when ChatGPT creates content that is later challenged as illegal, Section 230 will not be a defense.”

But even if AI apps create their own content, does that make their developers responsible for that content? Alphabet trained its AI assistant Gemini and put certain boundaries in place, but it can’t predict Gemini’s every response to individual user prompts. Could a chatbot itself count as a separate “information content provider”—its own speaker under the law?

That could leave a liability void. Granting Section 230 immunity to AI for libelous output would “completely cut off any recourse for the libeled person, against anyone,” noted law professor Eugene Volokh in the paper “Large Libel Models? Liability for AI Output,” published in 2023 in the Journal of Free Speech Law.

Treating chatbots as independent “thinkers” is wrong too, argues University of Akron law professor Jess Miers. Chatbots “aren’t autonomous actors—they’re tightly controlled, expressive systems reflecting the intentions of their developers,” she says. “These systems don’t merely ‘remix’ third-party content; they generate speech that expresses the developers’ own editorial framing. In that sense, providers are at least partial ‘creators’ of the resulting content—placing them outside 230’s protection.”

The picture gets more complicated when you consider the user’s role. What happens when a generative AI user—through simple prompting or more complicated manipulation techniques—induces an AI app to produce illegal or otherwise legally actionable speech?

Under certain circumstances, it might make sense to absolve AI developers of responsibility. “It’s hard to justify holding companies liable when they’ve implemented reasonable safeguards and the user deliberately circumvents them,” Miers says.

Liability would likely turn on multiple factors, including the rules programmed into the AI and the specific requests a user employed.

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