Rubaya mine produces about 15% of the world’s coltan, which is processed into tantalum, used in mobile phones

More than 200 people were killed this week in a collapse at the Rubaya coltan mine in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, Lumumba Kambere Muyisa, a spokesperson for the rebel-appointed governor of the province where the mine is located, told Reuters on Friday.

Rubaya produces about 15% of the world’s coltan, which is processed into tantalum – a heat-resistant metal that is in high demand by makers of mobile phones, computers, aerospace components and gas turbines. The site, where local people dig manually for a few dollars a day, has been under the control of the M23 rebel group since 2024.

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George Zinn, 71, further admitted to possessing child sexual abuse material and pleaded no contest to allegations

A man accused of trying to thwart authorities investigating Charlie Kirk’s killing by falsely confessing to the deadly shooting faces up to 15 years in prison after pleading no contest to the allegation – and separately admitting to possessing child sexual abuse material.

The case centering on George Zinn, 71, all but concluded at a court hearing on Thursday in Provo, Utah, about 5 miles away from the college campus where the Turning Point USA executive director was fatally shot on 10 September 2025.

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Sundance film festival: a once-in-a-lifetime dinner party from 1972 is transformed into a thrilling and inspiring hang-out movie

In August 1972, the experimental film-maker William Greaves convened a once-in-a-lifetime dinner party at Duke Ellington’s townhouse in Harlem. The occasion was a celebration and reconsideration of the Harlem Renaissance, the watershed African American cultural movement of the 1920s. The guest list included its still-living luminaries, some of the 20th century’s most influential – and still underappreciated – musicians, performers, artists, writers, historians and political leaders, all in their sunset years. Over four hours and untold glasses of wine, talk wheeled freely from vivid recollections to consternation, lively anecdotes to contemplations of ongoing struggle. Greaves, by then niche renowned for his innovatively meta documentary Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, lightly directed the conversation but otherwise let the energy flow. He considered it the most important footage he ever recorded.

You could probably release that remarkable footage in full, completely unedited and unstructured, and still have a good documentary; every piece is now, 50 years later – the same distance to us as the Harlem Renaissance was to them – a bridge to a time no living person can remember, each face and gesture informed by decades of aftermath no straightforward nonfiction film on the period could capture. But Once Upon a Time in Harlem, directed by Greaves’s son David, who was one of four cameramen that day, manages to seamlessly clip and contextualize the party into 100 mesmerizing minutes. It’s both a sublime hang-out of a film and a celebration of individual achievements, a fascinating map of a long-ago scene and a referendum on legacy.

Once Upon a Time in Harlem is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution

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A new species of squid. pretends to be a plant:

Scientists have filmed a never-before-seen species of deep-sea squid burying itself upside down in the seafloor—a behavior never documented in cephalopods. They captured the bizarre scene while studying the depths of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), an abyssal plain in the Pacific Ocean targeted for deep-sea mining.

The team described the encounter in a study published Nov. 25 in the journal Ecology, writing that the animal appears to be an undescribed species of whiplash squid. At a depth of roughly 13,450 feet (4,100 meters), the squid had buried almost its entire body in sediment and was hanging upside down, with its siphon and two long tentacles held rigid above the seafloor.

“The fact that this is a squid and it’s covering itself in mud—it’s novel for squid and the fact that it is upside down,” lead author Alejandra Mejía-Saenz, a deep-sea ecologist at the Scottish Association for Marine Science, told Live Science. “We had never seen anything like that in any cephalopods…. It was very novel and very puzzling.”

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Blog moderation policy.

Consider yourselves compromised, experts warn

Ivanti has patched two critical zero-day vulnerabilities in its Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM) product that are already being exploited, continuing a grim run of January security incidents for enterprise IT vendors.…

Lying means dying

Lying means dying, at least for one falsehood-peddling government AI. A Microsoft-powered chatbot that New York City rolled out to help business owners answer frequently asked questions – but was often wrong – has been silenced as the city grapples with a $12 billion budget shortfall.…

MINNEAPOLIS (ANP) - Duizenden mensen hebben zich verzameld in het centrum van Minneapolis om te protesteren tegen immigratiedienst ICE. CNN meldt dat demonstranten teksten scanderen en borden omhooghouden met de tekst 'ICE Out'.

De Amerikaanse zanger Bruce Springsteen was vrijdag ook aanwezig. Hij bracht deze week het lied 'Streets of Minneapolis' uit, een protestlied ter ere van Alex Pretti en Renée Good, die door federale agenten werden doodgeschoten. Hij zong het nummer tijdens een benefietconcert voor de families van de slachtoffers.

Verslaggevers van The New York Times melden ook demonstraties in New York en Los Angeles. Er zijn ook protesten gepland in andere Amerikaanse steden, zoals Atlanta en Chicago. Talloze bedrijven in het land zeggen hun deuren te sluiten uit protest tegen de federale immigratieacties in Minneapolis.

As the Barcelona Shakedown draws to a close, F1.com has the lowdown on how Day 5 unfolded.

Apple "runs on Anthropic at this point" and that the AI company is powering much of what Apple does internally for product development and internal tools, according to Mark Gurman, the most influential reporter on the Apple beat.

Apple had initially pursued an AI deal with Anthropic before the Google partnership came together, but negotiations fell apart over pricing -- Anthropic reportedly wanted several billion dollars per year and a doubling of fees over time. Apple's deal with Google is costing roughly one billion dollars annually.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In de documentaire ‘Melania‘ wil de Amerikaanse presidentsvrouw Melania Trump zichzelf presenteren als liefdevol, empathisch en bovenal stijlvol. Is dat gelukt?