Vice President Vance said the U.S. delegation is heading to Pakistan with “pretty clear guidelines” from President Trump to negotiate a deal with Iran. “We’re looking forward to negotiation,” Vance told reporters before departing for Islamabad on Friday. “I think it’s going to be positive.” Vance is leading the U.S. group, which also includes special… Source link
Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech It’s well known that students from grade schools to the big universities are increasingly outsourcing their thinking to large language models (LLMs). The consequences are already measurable: elementary students are losing cognitive skills, leading them to tank their exams. Harder to quantify — but impossible to miss if you’ve spent any time in school lately — is the situation unfolding across classrooms, where students from all layers of society have become empty vessels that parrot the outputs of AI without critically engaging with the subject matter at hand. One student at Yale University, identified as Amanda, told CNN that the monotonous prose of ChatGPT is even seeping into Ivy-league seminars. As the student and her classmates have observed, in-class conversations among peers are becoming increasingly flat and predictable, a symptom of students leaning on AI to think through discussions for them. During one memorable awkward silence in class, Amanda told CNN she saw “someone typing ferociously on their …
Senior Iranian officials have denied that Iran held talks with the United States, just hours after US President Donald Trump claimed “very good and productive conversations” had taken place towards ending the war. Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said in a social media post on Monday that “no negotiations have been held with the US”. Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of list “Fakenews [sic] is used to manipulate the financial and oil markets and escape the quagmire in which the US and Israel are trapped,” Ghalibaf wrote on X. That echoed earlier remarks from Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei, who also denied that any discussions with the US had taken place. In comments shared by Iran’s official IRNA news agency, Baghaei said that “messages have been received from some friendly countries regarding the US’s request for negotiations to end the war”. The denials come as the US-Israeli war on Iran has entered its fourth week, with the Israeli military saying on Monday that it had launched a fresh wave of attacks on …
Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Bridgerton star Nicola Coughlan has voiced her profound disinterest in the concept of “body positivity,” labelling discussions about her size as “boring” and a distraction from her craft. The 39-year-old Irish actor, celebrated for her role as Penelope Featherington in the Netflix regency drama and Clare Devlin in Channel 4’s Derry Girls, shared her candid views in an interview with Elle UK. “The thing I say sometimes that pisses people off is I have no interest in body positivity,” Coughlan stated. “When I was a kid growing up, I never thought about that. I didn’t look at actors and think about their bodies. So, I actually don’t care.” She added, “There’s a lot of things I’m passionate about, it’s not one of them… That’s someone else’s thing. It’s not mine.” Coughlan highlighted the absurdity of being praised as a “plus-size” actress …
Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Bridgerton star Nicola Coughlan has voiced her profound disinterest in the concept of “body positivity,” labelling discussions about her size as “boring” and a distraction from her craft. The 39-year-old Irish actor, celebrated for her role as Penelope Featherington in the Netflix regency drama and Clare Devlin in Channel 4’s Derry Girls, shared her candid views in an interview with Elle UK. “The thing I say sometimes that pisses people off is I have no interest in body positivity,” Coughlan stated. “When I was a kid growing up, I never thought about that. I didn’t look at actors and think about their bodies. So, I actually don’t care.” She added, “There’s a lot of things I’m passionate about, it’s not one of them… That’s someone else’s thing. It’s not mine.” Coughlan highlighted the absurdity of being praised as a “plus-size” actress …
Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi, left, arrives at the site of talks between Iran and the US in Muscat, on Friday, February 6, 2026. MINISTÈRE DES AFFAIRES ÉTRANGÈRES IRANIEN/AP A “good start,” according to Iranian diplomats, but also a new round of American sanctions. That was how negotiations between the United States and Iran ended on Friday, February 6, in Muscat, Oman, which has been acting as an intermediary. These were the first formal discussions between the two countries about Tehran’s nuclear program since the “Twelve-Day War” in June 2025. That conflict allowed Israel and its American ally to strike Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities and eliminate numerous officers and scientists, without pushing for regime change at the time. In the eyes of the Trump administration, this was now a final chance for negotiations, under the threat of potential American strikes against Iran. But tensions ran high, just a month after the bloody crackdown on a major protest movement against the regime, which reportedly left more than 30,000 dead, according to the most pessimistic estimates. Talks …
Donald Trump has criticised Keir Starmer’s “very dangerous” attempts to forge closer ties between the UK and China. The prime minister held talks with President Xi in Beijing on Thursday as he tries to improve relations with his communist counterpart. During his trip to China, Starmer has secured a halving of tariffs on Scotch whisky as well as a deal which will see UK citizens visiting the country for less than 30 days no longer needing a visa. He said he wanted Britain and China to have “a more sophisticated” relationship than they have in recent years, and even suggested that President Xi could visit the UK in future. But asked by reporters early on Friday about the PM’s efforts to strengthen economic ties with China, Trump said: “Well, it’s very dangerous for them to do that, and it’s even more dangerous, I think, for Canada to get into business with China. “Canada’s not doing well. They’re doing very poorly and you can’t look at China as the answer.” That was a reference to Canadian …
The White House was conducting back-channel communications with Venezuela’s hardline interior minister Diosdado Cabello months before the US operation to seize President Nicolas Maduro, and has been in communication with him since then, according to Reuters, citing multiple government officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. Cabello, who was Maduro’s right hand and seen as Venezuela’s second most powerful figure (and close aide of the late former President Hugo Chavez), was key to a ‘smooth’ regime change – as the 62-year-old had (and has) the power to turn the country’s security services or militant ruling-party supporters he oversees to target the country’s opposition. That security apparatus he controls has remained largely intact since the Jan. 3 US raid. Cabello is named in the same U.S. drug-trafficking indictment that the Trump administration used as justification to arrest Maduro, but was not taken as part of the operation. The communication with Cabello, which has also touched on sanctions the U.S. has imposed on him and the indictment he faces, dates back to the early days of the current Trump administration and continued in the weeks just prior …
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning. “Talking about politics at our family gatherings can be like smoking a cigarette at a gas station—there’s a good chance it will make the whole place explode,” the journalist Elizabeth Harris wrote last year. So she tried to approach these conversations like a reporter: “I wasn’t looking to have a back-and-forth; I was looking for information. I wanted to know what they thought and why.” Politics isn’t the only topic that can feel impossible to discuss. Families struggle to talk about their history, about what they need from one another, about the things they regret or haven’t forgiven one another for. The holidays can sometimes feel like the powder keg Harris described, where everyone is trying to avoid saying the wrong thing. But maybe there’s another way. Today’s newsletter explores how to approach even the hardest family conversations. …
