Top 5 US news stories
February 17 2026
US-Iran Nuclear Talks Resume in Geneva as American Military Buildup Intensifies
Pentagon Moves to Designate Anthropic a Supply Chain Risk Over AI Weapons Dispute
Epstein Document Release Triggers Unprecedented Wave of Global Resignations
AI-Driven Demand Spurs Micron to Launch $200 Billion U.S. Chip Factory Expansion
China's 50,000-Kilometer High-Speed Rail Network Powers World's Largest Annual Migration
2026 Winter Olympics medal count
BREAKING...Jesse Jackson dead at 84...
US-Iran Nuclear Talks Resume in Geneva Amid Massive Naval Buildup as Trump Warns of Consequences for Failed Diplomacy
Nuclear negotiations between the United States and Iran are set to resume Tuesday in Geneva, with Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner leading the American delegation, as the region braces for a potential military confrontation should diplomacy fail. President Trump, speaking aboard Air Force One on Monday, said he would participate "indirectly" and stressed that Iran "would not want the consequences of not making a deal," while the Pentagon has deployed two aircraft carriers and what one open-source intelligence account described as one-third of the U.S. Navy fleet to the region — a buildup that followed Trump's pledge last month to support antigovernment demonstrators in Iran, protests the Iranian government subsequently crushed in a crackdown that rights groups say killed thousands.
Pentagon Nears Designating Anthropic a 'Supply Chain Risk' After AI Firm Resists Military Demands on Weapons and Surveillance
U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is reportedly close to severing business ties with artificial intelligence company Anthropic and designating it a "supply chain risk" — a penalty typically reserved for foreign adversaries that would force any firm seeking military contracts to cut ties with the company — after months of failed negotiations over the terms under which the military can use Anthropic's large language model Claude, currently the only AI model deployed in the military's classified systems and used in January's operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, according to Axios. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said the relationship is "being reviewed," adding that "our nation requires that our partners be willing to help our warfighters win in any fight," while the dispute centers on Anthropic's insistence that its tools not be used for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons — conditions the Pentagon calls "unacceptable" as it pushes Anthropic and three other major AI labs to agree to "all lawful purposes" access, with the contract at stake valued at up to $200 million.
DOJ's Release of Three Million Epstein Documents Topples Executives, Diplomats, and Officials Across Three Continents
The U.S. Department of Justice's release of over three million pages of Epstein-related documents in late January has triggered a sweeping global reckoning, toppling figures across industries and borders at a pace with few modern precedents. In the U.S., departures include Hyatt executive chair Thomas Pritzker, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers (who also left OpenAI's board and was placed on leave at Harvard), Paul Weiss chairman Brad Karp, Goldman Sachs general counsel Kathy Ruemmler, and LA 2028 Olympics chair Casey Wasserman, while Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick faces mounting resignation calls. In the U.K., former ambassador Peter Mandelson now faces a criminal investigation and PM Keir Starmer's chief of staff Morgan McSweeney stepped down. The fallout extends to Slovakia, Norway, Sweden, and Dubai, where DP World CEO Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem resigned — a cascade that continues to grow as researchers work through the vast trove of files.
Micron Races to Spend $200 Billion on U.S. Factories as AI Boom Triggers Worst Memory Chip Shortage in Four Decades
With 7 million pounds of dynamite already detonated, 70,000 tons of steel earmarked per facility, and clean rooms spanning more than 10 football fields each, Micron Technology's $50 billion expansion of its Boise campus — set to more than double the 450-acre site with two new fabrication plants producing DRAM for high-bandwidth memory chips essential to AI computing — with each fab expected to use 70,000 tons of steel (almost as much as the Golden Gate Bridge) and 300,000 cubic yards of concrete (enough for four Empire State Buildings) — represents only a fraction of the company's response to what executives call the most disruptive supply crunch in over 40 years. The first Boise fab is expected to begin production by mid-2027 and both plants by the end of 2028, while near Syracuse, Micron has broken ground on a separate $100 billion complex representing New York State's largest-ever private investment, and announced a $9.6 billion fab in Hiroshima, Japan.
Behind the frenetic building spree is an AI boom that has sent demand for memory chips far beyond available capacity, as large language models from OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic, and others require ever more and faster memory for both training and inference, and as competitors including SK Hynix commit billions to their own expansions. "I've been here for 28 years, and I've never seen anything so disruptive as AI," said Scott Gatzemeier, the Micron vice president overseeing the U.S. expansion, noting that the shift from training to inference caused data requirements to explode beyond existing clean-room capacity.
China's High-Speed Rail Network Circles the Globe as Half a Billion Passengers Ride Home for Lunar New Year
China's railways are ferrying roughly 20 million passengers a day during the 40-day lunar new year travel period — what demographers call the world's largest annual human migration — and increasingly, the journey is happening at unprecedented speed: nearly three-quarters of travelers now ride at more than 200 kilometers per hour on the white-and-silver bullet trains that have become a symbol of China's industrial ambitions, streaking across a high-speed rail network that reached 50,000 kilometers in December, enough track to circle the globe and dwarfing the European Union's 8,500 kilometers as of 2023, linking 97 percent of Chinese cities with populations over half a million just two decades after the system launched.
February 17 1915: Zeppelin L-4 crashes into North Sea
The German zeppelin L-4 crash-lands in the North Sea near the Danish coastal town of Varde. The zeppelin, a motor-driven rigid airship, was developed by German inventor Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin in 1900. Although a French inventor had built a power-driven airship several decades before, Zeppelin’s rigid dirigible, with its steel framework, was by far the largest airship ever constructed.
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Sources
- NYT — nytimes.com/2026/02/17/us/politics/us-iran-nuclear-talks
- X/@menchosint — x.com/menchosint/status/2023290054928404958
- Axios — axios.com/2026/02/16/anthropic-defense-department-relationship-hegseth
- WSJ — wsj.com/tech/micron-is-spending-200-billion...
- FT — ft.com/content/3c15be3c-bb91-49e9-8fb4-6388b948ad2d
