Japan's first female Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi, has called for snap elections, staking her political future on the outcome, according to NPR Politics. The announcement comes as Takaichi, President of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), delivered a campaign speech in Tokyo on February 7, 2026, ahead of the House of Representatives election.
Meanwhile, in the tech world, a new social network for bots, Moltbook, gained rapid popularity. Launched on January 28 by US tech entrepreneur Matt Schlicht, Moltbook quickly went viral, according to MIT Technology Review. The platform was designed for instances of OpenClaw, a free open-source LLM-powered agent, to interact. More than 1.7 million agents had accounts, publishing over 250,000 posts and leaving more than 8.5 million comments.
In other news, the Senate Judiciary subcommittee held a hearing on the proposed merger between Netflix and Warner Brothers Discovery, as reported by Fortune. Concerns were raised about Netflix's potential to become a monopoly in the subscription video-on-demand market. Chairman Mike Lee expressed worry that Netflix could become "the one platform to rule them all" if the merger proceeds, potentially harming consumers and content creators. Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos attempted to downplay these concerns.
Also, according to Fortune, Anthropic cofounder Daniela Amodei believes that uniquely human qualities will be increasingly important in the age of AI. She stated that the number of jobs AI can perform without human assistance is "vanishingly small." Amodei added that humans and AI working together can create "more meaningful work, more challenging work, more interesting work, high-productivity jobs."
Finally, in a different vein, Al Lowe, the creator of the Leisure Suit Larry games, was interviewed, as reported by Hacker News. The interview covered topics beyond the Larry series, including Lowe's other game creations and his love for music and model trains.
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