HellsBelle

In June, a sharp-suited Austrian executive from a global surveillance company told a prospective client that he could “go to prison” for organizing the deal they were discussing. But the conversation did not end there.

The executive, Guenther Rudolph, was seated at a booth at ISS World in Prague, a secretive trade fair for police and intelligence agencies and advanced surveillance technology companies. Rudolph went on to explain how his firm, First Wap, could provide sophisticated phone-tracking software capable of pinpointing any person in the world. The potential buyer? A private mining company, owned by an individual under sanction, who intended to use it to surveil environmental protesters. “I think we’re the only one who can deliver,” Rudolph said.

What Rudolph did not know: He was talking to an undercover journalist from Lighthouse Reports, an investigative newsroom based in the Netherlands.

The road to that conference room in Prague began with the discovery of a vast archive of data by reporter Gabriel Geiger. The archive contained more than a million tracking operations: efforts to grab real-time locations of thousands of people worldwide. What emerged is one of the most complete pictures to date of the modern surveillance industry.

Banks, governments and technology providers need to be prepared for quantum computer hackers capable of breaking most existing encryption systems by 2029, Google has warned.

The tech company said in a blogpost that quantum computers would pose a “significant threat to current cryptographic standards” before the end of the decade and urged other companies to follow its lead.

The company, owned by Alphabet, said: “The encryption currently used to keep your information confidential and secure could easily be broken by a large-scale quantum computer in coming years.”

As it stands, quantum computers – which can rapidly carry out complex tasks – are a nascent technology with great potential and significant obstacles to being widely usable.

A year ago this month, President Donald Trump granted clemency to nearly 1,600 people responsible for the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. When Robert Pape, a University of Chicago political science professor who studies domestic political violence, heard about the pardons, he says he immediately thought it was “going to be the worst thing that happened in the second Trump presidency.” The first year of Trump’s second term has been a blizzard of policies and executive actions that have shattered presidential norms, been challenged in court as unlawful, threatened to remake the federal government, and redefined the limits of presidential power. But Pape argues that Trump’s decision to pardon and set free the January 6 insurrectionists, including hundreds who had been found guilty of assaulting police, could be the most consequential decision of his second term. “There are many ways we could lose our democracy. But the most worrisome way is through political violence,” Pape says. “Because the political violence is what would make the democratic backsliding you’re so used to hearing about irreversible. And then how might that actually happen? You get people willing to fight for Trump."

In Iran, millions of protesters have taken to the streets to protest the repressive religious regime that has ruled the country for more than four decades. The response of the government, led by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been swift and brutal, with thousands of protesters reportedly killed. All over the world, onlookers are cheering the courage of the Iranian people who are risking their lives to fight for their freedom. In a video posted on X, Reza Pahlavi, the son of the shah who led the country for 38 years until he was ousted by the current regime in 1979, vowed, “We will completely bring the Islamic Republic and its worn-out, fragile apparatus of repression to its knees.” In a Tuesday post on Truth Social, President Donald Trump encouraged the Iranian people to “KEEP PROTESTING—TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!” But for some Christians, the Iranian protests are more than just a popular uprising; they are the fulfillment of ancient Biblical prophecies that foretell the second coming of the Messiah. Last June, shortly after the United States bombed Iran, I wrote about the US evangelicals who were cheering that move: Broadly speaking—though there are certainly exceptions—many of the most ardent supporters of Trump’s decision to bomb Iran identify as Christian Zionists, a group that believes that Israel and the Jewish people will play a key role in bringing about the second coming of the Messiah. As Christians, they are called to hasten this scenario, says Matthew Taylor, a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore and author of The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy. “The mission, so to speak, is to get the Jews back to Israel and to establish themselves within Israel,” he says. “Then you fulfill the preconditions, or one of the preconditions, for the second coming.” The dark side of this theology, Taylor added, is that in this version of the end times, once the Messiah comes, the Jews will either convert to Christianity or perish.

The narrative put forward by the administration is largely disproved by available video evidence. And it has even been received with skepticism by some former ICE employees, who are condemning Ross’ use of force against the 37-year-old mother of three and warning that their one-time agency has lost its way. Former ICE chief of staff Jason Hauser recently wrote in USA Today: “When enforcement is driven by messaging instead of mission, when optics outweigh judgment and when leadership substitutes spectacle for strategy, the risk to officers, civilian and public safety increases exponentially.” The second Trump presidency has taken ICE off the leash. The agency is now the highest-funded law enforcement body in the United States, with a budget that eclipses that of some countries’ militaries. With its near-unlimited resources and aggressive directions from the White House, ICE is sending federal immigration agents not trained in community policing to make at-large arrests in cities across the country. (Days after the shooting, Noem announced DHS would deploy hundreds more agents to Minneapolis.) Two ex-ICE workers I spoke with described an agency that, in pursuit of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation mandate, is engaging in reckless and risky behavior.

A website dedicated to naming ICE and Border Patrol employees is coming under a “prolonged and sophisticated” cyber attack after the Daily Beast revealed it planned to make public 4,500 names of federal immigration staff. The founder of ICE List said the website was overwhelmed by malicious web traffic originating in Russia after the Beast reported that a huge cache of personal IDs had been leaked to the site by an alleged Department of Homeland Security whistleblower. The Direct Denial of Service (DDOS) assault, which began on Tuesday evening and is still ongoing at the time of publication, saw a huge number of IPs simultaneously access the website of ICE List, a self-styled “accountability initiative.” This has successfully overloaded the ICE List’s servers and is preventing people from accessing the site. The timing coincided with ICE List founder Dominick Skinner telling the Daily Beast he would make public the first tranche of names in the dataset, which was leaked following the shooting by an ICE agent of mom Renee Nicole Good.

Archive link France has banned 10 British far-right activists for actions in France intended to stop migrants crossing to the United Kingdom on small boats, the French interior ministry said Wednesday, January 14. On Tuesday, following reports that members of the “Raise the Colours” movement had conducted anti-migrant actions in France, “territorial bans were issued against 10 British nationals, identified as activists within the movement and having carried out actions on French soil,” it said. The French authorities did not immediately give the identities of the 10 people. A social media account called “Raise the Colours Operation France” late last year posted videos of far-right activists on France’s northern coastline. In one video posted in November, an activist filmed himself on a French beach, saying he had found a small inflatable boat buried in the sand and had slashed it. “That is not going to England,” says the man, who elsewhere has called himself Ryan Bridge. In another post published earlier the same month, he wades into the sea, and shouts at what looks like dozens of undocumented migrants boarding an inflatable dinghy on their way to England. “You’re not welcome in our country,” he says.

British (veterinarians) have been forced to chase lorries down the motorway on their way to Dover due to the “pure hell” of Brexit paperwork needed by inspectors in Calais, MPs have been told. Toby Ovens of Broughton Transport told the business and trade committee that Brexit has been a costly and logistic nightmare, and hopes of a reset with the EU represented “light at the end of the tunnel”. Brandishing a wad of paperwork with 26 stamps compared with one sheet needed before Brexit, Ovens criticised the post-Brexit bureaucracy he faced when shipping lamb and beef to the continent. Liam Byrne, chair of the committee, opened the evidence session by telling witnesses that red tape was costing the UK an extra £8.4bn. "Goods trade is down 18% on five years ago, food and drink down 24%,” he said.

An ophthalmologist in Tehran has documented more than 400 eye injuries from gunshots in a single hospital, as overwhelmed medical staff struggle to cope with the toll of an increasingly violent crackdown on nationwide protests by Iranian authorities. Three doctors, in messages forwarded to the Guardian on Monday, described overwhelmed hospitals and emergency wings overflowing with protesters who had been shot. Medical staff said the gunshot wounds were mostly concentrated on protesters’ eyes and heads – a tactic that rights groups said authorities used against demonstrators in the country’s 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests. “[Security forces] are deliberately shooting at the head and the eyes. They want to damage the head and the eyes so they can no longer see, the same thing they did in [2022],” said a doctor in Tehran. The doctor added that many of the patients had to have their eyes removed and were blinded. Iran’s demonstrations, which started on 28 December over a sudden dip in the value of the country’s currency, have since turned into the country’s biggest anti-government protest movement since 2009. Tens of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets across the country each night, chanting anti-government slogans such as “death to the dictator”, a reference to the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

U.S. President Donald Trump says his country needs Greenland for national security. That has Greenlanders worried about their own national security. Inuit advocacy groups, as well as Greenlanders who live in Canada, are emphatically opposed to American designs on their homeland. And, they say, they’re tired of being used as geopolitical chess pieces by powerful people in faraway capitals. “We want to say loud and clear that there’s no such thing as a better colonizer,” said Sara Olsvig, chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council and a former member of both the Greenlandic and Danish parliaments. “We have already been through colonization and we know what it means when the interests of others and more powerful nations and peoples affects us negatively and when decisions are taken thousands of kilometres away from us.”

What do a purple cartoon cat and abortion have in common? Nothing – and that is the point, say the women behind Jacarandas, a Colombian abortion helpline. Determined to set themselves apart from more traditional reproductive health organisations, Jacarandas commissions street and graphic artists to create eye-catching illustrations – most recently a cartoon feline called Gataranda, inspired by the team’s much-loved office pet. The aim is not to make light of abortion but to appeal to the teenagers and young women who use Jacarandas’ services. “A lot of people do not connect with [an image of] the uterus on fire, so we thought ‘what can we do to connect more with young women?’” says Carolina Benítez Mendoza, the deputy director. “We try to stay current and make things that are fun; we adapt our vibe for whatever’s trending. We don’t want to be that feminist organisation that’s had the same logo since 1995. Make abortion cats mainstream!” The strategy is working. Jacarandas is the most-followed abortion account on social media in the Spanish-speaking world, with nearly 400,000 followers on TikTok, and 312,000 on Instagram. Since it started it has received messages from more than 26,300 people, and in 2025 provided advice to about 700 users a month. Abortion is legal up to 24 weeks in Colombia, but most users contact Jacarandas as soon as they miss a period, and 93% have an abortion before 12 weeks.

Oversight committee chair James Comer said that he will move to hold former president Bill Clinton in contempt of Congress for refusing to testify as part of the ongoing investigation into the Jeffrey Epstein case. Speaking to reporters, the Republican lawmaker from Kentucky said that he will begin the proceedings during the committee’s markup period next week. This comes legal representatives for both Bill and Hillary Clinton sent an eight-page letter to Comer notifying him that they would not comply with the subpoenas compelling them to appear before the committee to deliver in-person testimony. “To my knowledge, former president Clinton has never answered questions about Epstein, and we just had questions,” Comer said today. “I think anyone would admit they spent a lot of time together while Bill Clinton was president and post-presidency.” Depending on the type of contempt citation, Clinton could either be forced to comply with the subpoena by a federal court, or even face prosecution by the justice department.

President Trump is expected to come under pressure to make rare disclosures about his properties and business interests as part of his $10bn lawsuit against the BBC, the Guardian understands. Trump is suing the BBC for defamation over a Panorama documentary that spliced together two parts of the president’s address to a rally on 6 January 2021. The BBC has already apologised and said the edit was misleading, but has denied it defamed Trump. In new documents submitted to the Florida court hearing the case, the corporation confirmed it will seek to have the case dismissed – a plan first reported by the Guardian. It will argue that the Florida court lacks “personal jurisdiction” over the corporation, the court venue is “improper” and that Trump has “failed to state a claim”. The corporation also argued that it should not be forced to make any legal disclosures about the documentary and its treatment of Trump before the judge deals with its request to have the case thrown out.

High-profile studies reporting the presence of microplastics throughout the human body have been thrown into doubt by scientists who say the discoveries are probably the result of contamination and false positives. One chemist called the concerns “a bombshell”. Studies claiming to have revealed micro and nanoplastics in the brain, testes, placentas, arteries and elsewhere were reported by media across the world, including the Guardian. There is no doubt that plastic pollution of the natural world is ubiquitous, and present in the food and drink we consume and the air we breathe. But the health damage potentially caused by microplastics and the chemicals they contain is unclear, and an explosion of research has taken off in this area in recent years. However, micro- and nanoplastic particles are tiny and at the limit of today’s analytical techniques, especially in human tissue. There is no suggestion of malpractice, but researchers told the Guardian of their concern that the race to publish results, in some cases by groups with limited analytical expertise, has led to rushed results and routine scientific checks sometimes being overlooked. The Guardian has identified seven studies that have been challenged by researchers publishing criticism in the respective journals, while a recent analysis listed 18 studies that it said had not considered that some human tissue can produce measurements easily confused with the signal given by common plastics.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration will end humanitarian protections that grant deportation relief and work permits to some 1,100 Somalis in the U.S., administration officials said on Tuesday, the latest restrictive move targeting Somali immigrants. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said she would end temporary protected status for Somalis, arguing that conditions in Somalia had improved, even as fighting continues between Somali armed forces and al-Shabaab militants. With the termination, the status will be set to expire on March 17, although a legal challenge is likely. “Country conditions in Somalia have improved to the point that it no longer meets the law’s requirement for Temporary Protected Status,” Noem said in a statement.

Archive link Former US president Bill Clinton and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton said Tuesday, January 13, they will refuse to comply with a congressional subpoena for them to testify in an investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. The Clintons slammed a Republican-controlled committee’s attempts as “legally invalid” as GOP lawmakers prepare contempt of Congress proceedings against them. In a letter released on social media Tuesday, the Clintons told the chair of the House Oversight Committee, Republican Representative James Comer, he was on the cusp of a process “literally designed to result in our imprisonment.” Comer said he will begin contempt of Congress proceedings next week. That would potentially start a complicated and politically messy process that Congress has rarely reached for.

The Swedish defense company Saab has released a promotional video showcasing the RBS-15 missile, which, much like the Ukrainian Neptune, has evolved from a purely anti-ship weapon into a versatile system designed to engage a wide range of targets. Although this capability is not new, as the RBS-15 Mk4 Gungnir was ordered by Sweden’s Ministry of Defence back in 2017 as an upgrade to a missile in service since 1984, the new video clearly demonstrates the types of adversaries the missile is intended to counter. The video features two representative target sets engaged by a total of six RBS-15 missiles. Two are launched from a Visby-class corvette, two from a notional ground-based launcher, and two from a JAS 39 Gripen fighter.

Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces continue to systematically dismantle Russia’s air defense network deep behind the front line, demonstrating a growing ability to strike high-value targets at operational depth. On January 12, 2025, Ukrainian drone operators destroyed three key enemy systems across the Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk directions in what was described as a single coordinated combat episode. The targets eliminated included Russian P-18 Prima early-warning radar, Tor short-range surface-to-air missile system, and Tunguska gun-missile air defense system. Together, these assets form a layered air defense cluster intended to protect Russian forces from aerial threats, particularly drones and precision-guided munitions. These strikes marked the ninth, tenth, and eleventh enemy radar and air defense systems destroyed between January 1 and January 12 alone. This pace highlights a deliberate campaign aimed not at random attrition, but at the systematic degradation of russia’s integrated air defense system in temporarily occupied territory.

The public lands grazing system was modernized in the 1930s in response to the rampant use of natural resources that led to the Dust Bowl — the massive dust storms triggered by poor agricultural practices, including overgrazing. Today, the system focuses on subsidizing the continued grazing of these lands. The BLM and Forest Service, the two largest federal land management agencies, oversee most of the system. Combined, the agencies charged ranchers $21 million in grazing fees in 2024. Our analysis found that to be about a 93% discount, on average, compared with the market rate for forage on private land. We also found that, in 2024 alone, the federal government poured at least $2.5 billion into subsidy programs that public lands ranchers can access. Such subsidies include disaster assistance after droughts and floods as well as compensation for livestock lost to predators. A small number of wealthy individuals and corporations manage most livestock on public lands. Roughly two-thirds of the grazing on BLM acreage is controlled by just 10% of ranchers, our analysis found. And on Forest Service land, the top 10% of permittees control more than 50% of grazing. Among the largest ranchers are billionaires like Stan Kroenke and Rupert Murdoch, as well as mining companies and public utilities. The financial benefits of holding permits to graze herds on public lands extend beyond cattle sales. Even hobby ranches can qualify for property tax breaks in many areas; ranching business expenses can be deducted from federal taxes; and private property associated with grazing permits is a stable long-term investment. (Representatives of Kroenke did not respond to requests for comment, and Murdoch’s representative declined to comment.) The administration released a “plan to fortify the American Beef Industry” in October that instructed the BLM and Forest Service to amend grazing regulations for the first time since the 1990s. The plan suggested that taxpayers further support ranching by increasing subsidies for drought and wildfire relief, livestock killed by predators and government-backed insurance. The White House referred questions to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which said in a statement, “Livestock grazing is not only a federally and statutorily recognized appropriate land use, but a proven land management tool, one that reduces invasive species and wildfire risk, enhances ecosystem health, and supports rural stewardship.” Roughly 18,000 permittees graze livestock on BLM or Forest Service land, most of them small operations. These ranchers say they need government support and cheaper grazing fees to avoid insolvency.