MAHA moms threaten to turn this car around as RFK Jr. flips on pesticide

MAHA moms threaten to turn this car around as RFK Jr. flips on pesticide

fivenewscrypto    février 23, 2026   

Members of the Make America Health Again movement are in open revolt after founder Robert F. Kennedy Jr. publicly backed President Trump's executive order Wednesday that would increase domestic production of glyphosate—a pesticide the MAHA movement and Kennedy have railed against.

Vani Hari, an ally of Kennedy who goes by "Food Babe," told The Washington Post she was left "speechless" by the move.

"We truly were hoping that this administration would put people over corporate power,” she said, "but this action moves us away from that commitment."

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Fury over Discord’s age checks explodes after shady Persona test in UK

Fury over Discord’s age checks explodes after shady Persona test in UK

fivenewscrypto    février 23, 2026   

Shortly after Discord announced that all users will soon be defaulted to teen experiences until their ages are verified, the messaging platform faced immediate backlash.

One of the major complaints was that Discord planned to collect more government IDs as part of its global age verification process. It shocked many that Discord would be so bold so soon after a third-party breach of a former age check partner's services recently exposed 70,000 Discord users' government IDs.

Attempting to reassure users, Discord claimed that most users wouldn't have to show ID, instead relying on video selfies using AI to estimate ages, which raised separate privacy concerns. In the future, perhaps behavioral signals would override the need for age checks for most users, Discord suggested, seemingly downplaying the risk that sensitive data would be improperly stored.

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FCC asks stations for "pro-America" programming, like daily Pledge of Allegiance

FCC asks stations for "pro-America" programming, like daily Pledge of Allegiance

fivenewscrypto    février 23, 2026   

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr today urged broadcasters to join a "Pledge America Campaign" that Carr established to support President Trump's "Salute to America 250" project.

Carr said in a press release that "I am inviting broadcasters to pledge to air programming in their local markets in support of this historic national, non-partisan celebration." The press release said Carr is asking broadcasters to "air patriotic, pro-America programming in support of America’s 250th birthday."

Carr gave what he called examples of content that broadcasters can run if they take the pledge. His examples include "starting each broadcast day with the 'Star Spangled Banner' or Pledge of Allegiance"; airing "PSAs, short segments, or full specials specifically promoting civic education, inspiring local stories, and American history"; running "segments during regular news programming that highlight local sites that are significant to American and regional history, such as National Park Service sites"; airing "music by America’s greatest composers, such as John Philip Sousa, Aaron Copland, Duke Ellington, and George Gershwin"; and providing daily “Today in American History” announcements highlighting significant events from US history.

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Meta's flagship metaverse service leaves VR behind

Meta's flagship metaverse service leaves VR behind

fivenewscrypto    février 23, 2026   

Meta announced today that it will divorce its Horizon Worlds social and gaming service—once promoted as the company's first major step into the metaverse—from its Quest VR headset platform and digital store.

The company says it is now "shifting the focus of Worlds to be almost exclusively mobile." The announcement is also filled with statements like "we're doubling down on the VR developer ecosystem" that are attempting to head off any suggestion that Meta is retreating from the mixed reality space.

This is far from the first signal that big changes are happening with Meta's mixed reality strategy. CNBC reported that Meta has lost $80 billion on investments in Reality Labs, the company's mixed reality division. More than 1,000 Reality Labs employees were laid off in January, but don't misread that as a total closure; more than 15,000 people were working in that part of the organization before the layoffs.

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Controversial NIH director now in charge of CDC, too, in RFK Jr. shake-up

Controversial NIH director now in charge of CDC, too, in RFK Jr. shake-up

fivenewscrypto    février 22, 2026   

Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the National Institutes of Health, is now also the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an unusual arrangement that has drawn swift criticism from researchers and public health experts.

Bhattacharya's new role comes amid a leadership shakeup in the Department of Health and Human Services under anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It also marks the third leader for the beleaguered public health agency under Kennedy.

Susan Monarez, a microbiologist and long-time federal health official, held the position of acting director before becoming the first Senate-confirmed CDC director at the end of July. But she was in the role just shy of a month before Kennedy ousted her for—according to Monarez—refusing to rubber-stamp changes to vaccine recommendations made by Kennedy's hand-picked advisors, who are overwhelmingly anti-vaccine themselves.

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Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today, starts removing 695,000 archive links

Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today, starts removing 695,000 archive links

fivenewscrypto    février 22, 2026   

The English-language edition of Wikipedia is blacklisting Archive.today after the controversial archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blog.

In the course of discussing whether Archive.today should be deprecated because of the DDoS, Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS. The alterations were apparently fueled by a grudge against the blogger over a post that described how the Archive.today maintainer hid their identity behind several aliases.

"There is consensus to immediately deprecate archive.today, and, as soon as practicable, add it to the spam blacklist (or create an edit filter that blocks adding new links), and remove all links to it," stated an update today on Wikipedia's Archive.today discussion. "There is a strong consensus that Wikipedia should not direct its readers towards a website that hijacks users' computers to run a DDoS attack (see WP:ELNO#3). Additionally, evidence has been presented that archive.today's operators have altered the content of archived pages, rendering it unreliable."

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Why Final Fantasy is now targeting PC as its "lead platform"

Why Final Fantasy is now targeting PC as its "lead platform"

fivenewscrypto    février 22, 2026   

For a long time now, PC gamers have been used to the Final Fantasy series treating their platform as somewhat secondary to the game's core console versions. There are some signs that may be starting to change, though, as director Naoki Hamaguchi has confirmed that the PC is now the "lead platform" for development of the Final Fantasy VII Remake trilogy.

In a recent interview with Automaton, Hamaguchi clarified that the team takes the relatively common practice of creating visual assets for its multiplatform games by targeting "high-end environments first," then performing a "reduction" for less powerful platforms. These days, that means "our 3D assets are created at the highest quality level based on PC as the foundation," he said. Players have already noticed this graphical difference in the PC version of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Hamaguchi said, and "our philosophy will not change for the third installment."

While PC gaming is only "gradually expanding in Japan," Hamaguchi said the rapid growth in international PC gamers has led the company to "develop assets with the broad PC market in mind."

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