Allison Martell

Exclusive: Prior to Iran attacks, CIA assessed Khamenei would be replaced by hardline IRGC elements if killed, sources say In the run-up to the U.S. and Israeli attacks on Saturday, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency assessed that even if Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in the operation, he would likely be replaced by hardline figures from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), two sources briefed on the intelligence said.

Exclusive: Prior to Iran attacks, CIA assessed Khamenei would be replaced by hardline IRGC elements if killed, sources say reut.rs/4l9SCAs

Exclusive | OpenAI Employees Raised Alarms About Canada Shooting Suspect Months Ago The ChatGPT maker opted against informing Canadian authorities about Jesse Van Rootselaar’s descriptions of violence last June.

Last summer, OpenAI employees debated alerting law enforcement about Jesse Van Rootselaar's interactions with ChatGPT

In February, Van Rootselaar became the suspect in the mass shooting that devastated a rural town in British Columbia

www.wsj.com/us-news/law/...

5000m short track speed skating relay might be the peak. They get to exchange whenever they want?

Washington Post layoffs disproportionately affected union members of color, preliminary Guild data shows "We cannot ignore what this means for equity, representation, and the future of this organization."

“The numbers tell a painful story. The impact on journalists of color is staggering and devastating,” the Post Guild said in its statement on Friday. “We cannot ignore what this means for equity, representation, and the future of this organization.”

www.niemanlab.org/2026/02/wash...

The White House is using millions of dollars from the former U.S. foreign aid agency to pay for the security detail of Russell Vought, President Donald Trump's budget chief and an architect of the government overhaul that has cut thousands of federal jobs.

www.reuters.com/world/us/whi...

Elon Musk's Grok AI floods X with sexualized photos of women and minors When contacted by Reuters for comment by email, xAI replied with the message "Legacy Media Lies."

Many are just waking up to the Grok-nonconsensual images story as these pictures began flooding X over the holidays, but here’s our piece from Jan 2 featuring a victim, Julie Yukari, who was brave enough to speak on the record and on camera:

www.reuters.com/legal/litiga...

Shadow navy: How China's civilian fleet could be a potent weapon in a Taiwan invasion A Reuters visual investigation of China's annual naval exercises off the Chinese coast opposite Taiwan shows how Beijing's

🎅1️⃣1️⃣ China’s shadow navy trains to take Taiwan, by @allisonmartell.bsky.social, David Lague, @claretfarley.bsky.social and Minami Funakoshi www.reuters.com/graphics/USA...

“Each writing exercise was designed to reinforce explicit instruction on different paper-writing skills” jumps out at me, because explicit instruction remains unfashionable in so many schools.

A screenshot from the article, including this text: Israa Mukhtar said RSF fighters cited the lack of adequate healthcare during an April attack that sent hundreds of thousands of civilians fleeing Zamzam, the displaced persons camp where she lived in North Darfur. Mukhtar and other women were collecting water at a pump near the camp's main health center, run by aid group Relief International. RSF vehicles arrived and fighters spilled out. "Why are you still here?” she recalled one fighter asking. “If you get injured, what will you do?" After someone replied that the health center was still open, the fighters drove toward the clinic. Minutes later, Mukhtar heard gunfire and screams. Image caption: Israa Mukhtar was nearby the Zamzam medical clinic when the RSF attacked. She said she heard screams and gunfire.

Hospital massacre caps a long series of attacks on healthcare in war-torn Sudan Almost 500 patients, their relatives and others were killed at al-Fashir's last functioning hospital during the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces' recent takeover of the Sudanese city, the World Healt...

This bracing story connects witness accounts from Sudan and data on violence against healthcare workers worldwide. www.reuters.com/world/sudan-...

Hospital massacre caps a long series of attacks on healthcare in war-torn Sudan Almost 500 patients, their relatives and others were killed at al-Fashir's last functioning hospital during the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces' recent takeover of the Sudanese city, the World Health Organization reported. The attack is an example of increasingly targeted and brutal attacks on hospitals, clinics and medical workers during conflict worldwide, a Reuters investigation found.

Hospital massacre caps a long series of attacks on healthcare in war-torn Sudan reut.rs/49EkUzg

Hospital massacre caps a long series of attacks on healthcare in war-torn Sudan Almost 500 patients, their relatives and others were killed at al-Fashir's last functioning hospital during the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces' recent takeover of the Sudanese city, the World Healt...

A massacre that the WHO says killed almost 500 at a Sudan hospital last month is an example of increasingly targeted and brutal attacks on hospitals, clinics and medical workers during conflict worldwide, Reuters found.
www.reuters.com/world/sudan-...

Today’s xkcd made me cry.

In a good way.

xkcd.com/3172/

In 2019 Meta did causal research looking at the effects of randomly asking Facebook users to stop using the platform for a month. After the first week of the study, results showed that leaving the platform was good for people’s mental health.

Meta then shut the project down.

How ProPublica Investigated a Bird Flu Outbreak in America’s Heartland Early this year, bird flu ripped through 80 farms in Ohio and Indiana. Using genetic markers, wind simulations, satellite imagery, property records and more, we found that the virus could’ve been airb...

Really ambitious, fascinating stuff here www.propublica.org/article/meth...

Our story about China's shadow navy is featured on the Reuters World News podcast today. www.reuters.com/graphics/USA...

This illustration, based on satellite images and state media videos of similar vessels at port, shows what the cargo ship landings would look like up close. A cargo ship with an open deck is at the shoreline, with a ramp folded down onto a beach. Vehicles are visible on deck, one driving down the ramp, and more are on the beach. A label says: "DECK CARGO SHIP: Its shallow draft allows it to approach the beach and offload vehicles and cargo." The ship's length is marked at ~90m.

In August, the same three ships joined three others, along with six ferries, at the same site to conduct the landing exercise laid out in detail in our story. Read it here: www.reuters.com/graphics/USA...

In July, we followed a ferry to an exercise in Guangdong. When we turned to BlackSky’s images, they showed the ferry, but also something we had never seen before – three cargo ships that were new to us, operating right at the beach.

I trained an AI model to detect when ships were off course, but once we were tasking satellites, even excellent performance was not good enough. Instead, I built an online dashboard where we could watch the ships in real time, and spun up GitHub actions to collect all AIS signals in a few key spots.

We tracked more than 100 AIS signals over the last year, and this summer we worked with BlackSky to task satellites, hoping to catch several views of one exercise.

A screen capture from an animation that shows ships arriving for the exercise we describe in the story. Lines and ship icons are shown over a map of a coastal area, with a point on the coast labelled 'Beach near Jiesheng.'

I mostly used the LSEG API for ship data, with some clean up and filtering in Python, and the temporal controller in QGIS. But there are a lot of civilian ships that could join these exercises, and finding this signal in the noise was challenging.

These deck cargo ships, about 90m long, are cheap to build, and used all over China, so experts tell us they significantly increase China’s capacity to deliver troops to Taiwan.

A high resolution satellite image taken through fog shows a cargo ship with a flat deck and ramp, fully laden with vehicles, arriving at a sandy beach.

You might have seen stories about ferries that join these exercises, or the barges launched in March that turn into a kind of temporary port. But this summer, we spotted another strategy: Cargo ships carrying vehicles right to the beach. (Image from BlackSky.)

Shadow navy: How China's civilian fleet could be a potent weapon in a Taiwan invasion A Reuters visual investigation of China's annual naval exercises off the Chinese coast opposite Taiwan shows how Beijing's

Yesterday we published a visual investigation about civilian ships in China that are training to invade Taiwan. This thread is about how we did it. www.reuters.com/graphics/USA... #OSINT

Shadow navy: How China's civilian fleet could be a potent weapon in a Taiwan invasion A Reuters visual investigation of China's annual naval exercises off the Chinese coast opposite Taiwan shows how Beijing's

It’s known that China is using ferries and other civilian vessels to prepare for an invasion of Taiwan. Reuters reporters wondered: Could we track vessels from the sky and learn more about China’s military strategy? The answer is yes. Here's how we did it: www.reuters.com/graphics/USA...

Shadow navy: How China's civilian fleet could be a potent weapon in a Taiwan invasion A Reuters visual investigation of China's annual naval exercises off the Chinese coast opposite Taiwan shows how Beijing's

New visual investigation: China's shadow navy trains to take Taiwan www.reuters.com/graphics/USA... #OSINT

A Reuters visual investigation shows China is developing concrete plans to invade Taiwan, a Taiwanese naval security expert said. The outcome of a Chinese attack could depend heavily on the response of the United States, the island’s most important ally reut.rs/4oJRPHe

What would make it illegal now?

New MMI piece: We look at the 3.5 million people in Canada who live in a home that is too small to meet their needs, and how a mismanaged push by governments and urban planners towards densification is at odds with the human right to housing.

Read here: www.missingmiddleini...

Phew!