📌 Huge AI Investment, Loch Ness Monster, More

A joint venture called Stargate will pump billions in private funding into US artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Oracle, Softbank and OpenAI said they plan to spend about $500 billion over the next four years on the venture. Larry Ellison, Oracle executive chairman, told reporters at the White House on Tuesday that 10 data centers for the project were already under construction in Texas.

“The kind of applications we are building, to give you an idea, may be the most charismatic, and the ones I think touches us all are electronic health records. Being able to provide health care plans that are much better than they otherwise would be,” Ellison said.

SoftBank chief executive officer Masayoshi Son said: "We will immediately start deploying $100 billion with a goal of making $500 billion within the next four years," Son said. “After that, artificial super intelligence will come to solve the issues that mankind would never ever have thought that we could solve.”

Open AI CEO Sam Altman said: “This will be the most important project of this era. … What this will do for the ability to deliver very high-quality health care … will be among the most important things this technology does.”

Ellison said AI could someday detect and diagnose cancer from a blood test. "Imagine early cancer detection, the development of a cancer vaccine … and [having] that vaccine available in 48 hours.” Trump said the venture could create “over 100,000 American jobs almost immediately.”

Five candidates are on the presidential election ballot in Belarus on Sunday. For the past 31 years, there has been one winner.

In power since 1994, Alexander Lukashenko is assured of a new five-year term in a vote that the exiled opposition describes as a “sham.” It has called on Belarusians to tick a box that allows them to reject all the candidates on offer.

Lukashenko, 70, has cast himself as a leader too busy working for the nation to be able to engage in an election campaign. “To be honest I don't follow it. I simply don't have time for it,” he told factory workers last week.

Mass protests nearly swept him from power after the last election in 2020, when Western governments backed the opposition's claim that he falsified the results and stole victory from its candidate, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya.

Lukashenko's security forces detained tens of thousands of protesters, according to human rights groups, and all leading opposition figures were jailed or forced into exile.

Sunday's vote is taking place in a country where independent media are banned and blocked. Human rights group Viasna, labeled as an extremist organization, says there are around 1,250 political prisoners; Lukashenko denies there are any.

An expected decline in interest rates could be stalled if tariffs are enacted, warned UBS CEO Sergio Ermotti.

“Tariffs will probably not really help inflation to come down. And therefore I don’t see rates coming down as fast as people believe,” he said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Markets have been on alert for the next trade steps of the newly inaugurated Trump, who has threatened to impose 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada, while also floating a separate set of retaliatory trade measures against China.

US inflation edged higher in December, rising to 2.9% year-on-year from 2.7% in November. The latest minutes of the US Federal Reserve December meeting pointed to an outlook of just two interest rate cuts in 2025, down from a previous estimate of four such trims.

The parents of two adopted children deny confining them to a shed despite police finding them behind a locked shed door.

Jeanne Kay Whitefeather took the stand Tuesday in the West Virginian Kanawha County circuit court as the second week began in the trial of her and her husband, Donald Ray Lantz. They are accused of mistreating four of the five children, all of whom are black.

Whitefeather and Lantz, who are white, each face over a dozen felony counts that include forced labor, civil rights violations, human trafficking, and gross child neglect.

Whitefeather and Lantz were arrested in October 2023 when neighbors called police to report seeing Lantz lock the oldest girl and her teenage brother in the shed and leave the property in Sissonville.

Whitefeather called the shed a “teenager hangout.” Whitefeather testified: “They weren’t locked in. They had a key. They could come and go as they pleased.”

But the oldest daughter, now 18, testified last week that she didn’t know about access to a key, which a detective had testified earlier was found out of sight on top of a cabinet in the shed. All five children are under the care of Child Protective Services. The oldest boy is receiving full-time care in a psychiatric facility.

Muscular strength and good physical fitness could almost halve the risk of cancer patients dying from their disease, a study says.

Data analysis of nearly 47,000 patients with various types and stages of cancer suggests muscular strength and good physical fitness are linked to a significantly lower risk of death from any cause in people with cancer.

Strength and fitness were associated with an 8-46% lower risk of death from any cause in patients with stage 3 or 4 cancer, and a 19-41% lower risk of death from any cause among those with lung or digestive cancers. “Muscle strengthening activities could be employed to increase life expectancy,” the researchers wrote.

Another study found maintaining a slimmer waistline along with regular exercise was far more effective at cutting the risk of cancer than doing only one or the other. The study of over 315,000 people investigated how the two actions combine to reduce cancer risk.

Dr. Helen Croker, assistant director of research and policy at the World Cancer Research Fund, said: “Maintaining a healthy weight and, in particular, having a waist circumference within the recommended level and being physically active, along with eating a healthy diet, are all crucial steps to reduce cancer risk.”

President Donald Trump's withdrawing the nation from the World Health Organization could harm the US, public health experts say.

Trump accused the WHO of “mishandling” the Covid pandemic, not adopting “urgently needed reforms” and being politically influenced by other member states. He also said the withdrawal was about “being ripped off.”

The text of Trump’s executive order describes an "unfair" demand of “onerous payments” from the US, “far out of proportion with other countries' assessed payments.”

Experts say that no longer being part of the WHO could mean losing the ability to collaborate on disease preparedness and response, as well as the ability to exchange information about emerging threats to public health.

Thomas Bollyky, director of the global health program at the think tank Council on Foreign Relations, said: ”The WHO … plays an irreplaceable role in global outbreak response and, by withdrawing … reduces [our] ability to positively influence that response to outbreak. It makes Americans less safe.”

Tim Coulson, a professor of Zoology at Oxford University, said it is a “biological impossibility” for the Loch Ness Monster to exist.

The first reported sighting of the monster is said to have been made in A.D. 565 by the Irish missionary St. Columba when he came across a giant beast in the River Ness. But no one has ever come up with a satisfactory explanation of his sighting and the many that followed.

Coulson said locals and tourists saw either “bits of floating debris or a bird, such as a cormorant with a longish neck that sits low in the water. …I apologize to all cryptozoologists for placing this big and very final nail into cryptids’ coffins, but it’s time to find another hobby.”

Some alleged snaps of the Loch Ness Monster that do exist suggest the animal has a long neck and a small head — similar to a giant marine reptile called a plesiosaur.

“It is a biological impossibility for a single individual of a long extinct species to live in Loch Ness, and if there were many hundreds, we would surely have caught some in our fishing nets,” Coulson said.