Congress Departs Washington Without DHS Funding, Setting Stage for Near-Certain Weekend Shutdown

National Guard Troops Fully Withdraw From Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland, Ending Monthslong Immigration Deployments

Detroit's Big Three Absorb $50 Billion in EV Write-Downs as Sales Crater After Tax Credit Expiration

Chinese AI Models Embed Pro-Beijing Bias Through Sophisticated Hidden Instructions

U.S. Smuggled Thousands of Starlink Terminals Into Iran as Pentagon Deploys Largest Carrier to Middle East

2026 Winter Olympics medal count

Congress Departs Washington Without DHS Funding, Setting Stage for Near-Certain Weekend Shutdown

Hours after the Trump administration announced it would pull immigration agents from Minnesota, Senate Democrats blocked a House-passed spending bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security, leaving the agency on a near-certain path to a shutdown beginning Saturday morning. The vote fell short of the 60 needed to overcome a filibuster, 52 to 47, as Democrats maintained their position demanding new restrictions on federal immigration enforcement — dismissing the Minnesota drawdown as insufficient. With both chambers adjourning for a weeklong recess and bipartisan negotiations showing little progress, the lapse would mark the third partial government shutdown in five months, affecting agencies including FEMA, the Coast Guard, the Secret Service and the TSA, though federal immigration operations are expected to continue using previously allocated funds.

NYT

National Guard Troops Fully Withdraw From Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland, Ending Monthslong Immigration Deployments

All National Guard troops deployed by the Trump administration to support federal immigration operations have left Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland, U.S. military officials confirmed, formally ending deployments that had fueled clashes between Democratic-led cities and the White House over presidential authority. The withdrawals, which occurred throughout January according to U.S. Northern Command, followed a Pentagon plan announced late last year, with only skeleton forces of a few hundred remaining by the end of the assignments.

NYT

Detroit's Big Three Absorb $50 Billion in EV Write-Downs as Sales Crater After Tax Credit Expiration

General Motors, Ford and Stellantis have collectively recorded more than $50 billion in write-downs on their electric-vehicle investments after U.S. EV sales plunged more than 30 percent in the fourth quarter, driven by the expiration of the $7,500 federal tax credit in September. Demand collapsed for high-profile models including Tesla's Cybertruck and Ford's F-150 Lightning, and automakers expect the slump to persist as years of aggressive EV spending collide with a sharply cooled market.

WSJ

Chinese AI Models Embed Pro-Beijing Bias Through Sophisticated Hidden Instructions

Researchers have discovered that Alibaba's latest Qwen3 AI models do not merely censor politically sensitive topics but are broadly aligned to present China in a uniformly positive light, internally instructing themselves to avoid critical statements and emphasize achievements. A coding technique that reveals the model's hidden reasoning showed it directing itself to keep answers "positive and constructive" — a level of sophistication that goes well beyond simple content filtering and raises concerns as Chinese AI tools gain global adoption.

China Media Project

U.S. Smuggled Thousands of Starlink Terminals Into Iran as Pentagon Deploys Largest Carrier to Middle East

The Trump administration covertly sent roughly 6,000 Starlink satellite-internet terminals into Iran after the regime killed thousands of protesters and severed internet connectivity during a January crackdown, U.S. officials said, marking the first direct American delivery of the technology to Iranian dissidents. The State Department purchased nearly 7,000 units — funded by diverting money from other internet-freedom programs — and President Trump was aware of the shipments. Meanwhile, the Pentagon is redeploying the USS Gerald R. Ford, the Navy's largest and most advanced aircraft carrier, from its position off Venezuela to the Middle East, where it will join the USS Abraham Lincoln and nine other warships already in the region as the U.S. intensifies planning for a potential strike on Iran.

WSJ

February 13 1633: Galileo arrives in Rome to face charges of heresy

Galileo’s 1633 trial for heresy, after he supported the Sun-centered Copernican system, shows how threatening empirical, observation-based science once was to established authority. His careful telescopic observations, willingness to challenge Aristotle, and insistence that nature—not doctrine—should arbitrate truth helped lay the groundwork for the scientific method of testing hypotheses against evidence.

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Sources

1. NYT — DHS Shutdown
2. NYT — National Guard Withdrawal
3. WSJ — EV Write-Downs
4. China Media Project — AI Bias
5. WSJ — Starlink in Iran
6. WSJ — Navy Deployment