Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned on Sunday that any attack by the United States would ignite a "regional war" in the Middle East, escalating tensions amid threats from President Donald Trump to militarily strike Iran, according to the Associated Press (NPR Politics). The warning, delivered on February 1, 2026, marked Khamenei's most direct threat to date, coinciding with the presence of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in the Indian Ocean (NPR Politics).
In other news, French company Capgemini announced on Sunday that it would sell its subsidiary, Capgemini Government Solutions, which provides technology services to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) (Fortune). This decision followed global scrutiny of ICE's tactics during the Trump administration's immigration crackdown (Fortune). The French government had reportedly pressured Capgemini to increase transparency regarding its dealings with ICE, particularly in light of actions in Minneapolis that raised concerns in France and other countries (Fortune). These actions included fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens allegedly at the hands of federal immigration officers (Fortune). Capgemini stated that the process of selling off the subsidiary would begin immediately (Fortune).
Meanwhile, within the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a power struggle over institute directorships has intensified as a new presidential administration prepares to fill approximately 4,000 jobs across the federal government (Ars Technica). These political appointees are intended to help execute the president's agenda and ensure government agencies are responsive to elected officials (Ars Technica).
In the realm of technology, many enterprises have deployed Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, aiming to democratize corporate knowledge by indexing PDFs and connecting them to Large Language Models (LLMs), according to VentureBeat. However, the performance of these systems has been underwhelming, especially in industries reliant on heavy engineering (VentureBeat). Standard RAG pipelines often treat documents as flat strings of text, using fixed-size chunking that can disrupt the logic of technical manuals by slicing tables, severing captions from images, and ignoring visual hierarchy (VentureBeat). "The failure isn't in the LLM. The failure is in the preprocessing," VentureBeat reported.
Finally, research suggests that certain species of fungus could potentially replace noxious insecticides in combating wood-devouring insects (Ars Technica). These insects, including beetles, termites, and carpenter ants, cause significant damage to structures and trees (Ars Technica). Eurasian spruce bark beetles, for example, ingest bark high in phenolic compounds, which protect spruce bark from pathogenic fungi (Ars Technica).
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