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4 macOS Features Apple Recently Added To Your Computer
macOS Tahoe 26.1 and 26.2 have added interesting features like a ring light for better FaceTime calls, the ability to tweak the transparency of the UI, etc.
Winter Olympics marred by suspected mafia infiltration
Preparations for the games have been marred by allegations of corruption and suspected infiltration by the mafia. Local activists warn of limited transparency and even the CEO of the Games admits ballooning costs.
Organic & Natural Health Association Honors SENPA’s Debra Short with Champion Award at Conference Shaping Policy, and the Future of Retail
FT. LAUDERDALE, Fla., Feb. 05, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Organic & Natural Health Association’s 11th annual conference, “The United States of Health: Building Bridges to Opportunity,” concluded Jan. 22 with a celebration of industry and a clear message: the future of natural health depends on independent retailers, credible science and modernized policy grounded in transparency and consumer protection. The conference convened Organic & Natural Health members, board leaders, and industry stake
It's time to think about human reproduction in space, scientists urge
"If reproduction is ever to occur beyond Earth, it must do so with a clear commitment to safety, transparency and ethical integrity."
RxUtility and Buzz Health Partner to Boost Medication Price Transparency for Consumers
NASHVILLE, Tenn. & FORT WALTON BEACH, Fla., February 03, 2026--RxUtility, a medication affordability toolkit, announced a partnership with Buzz Health, leveraging its RxCompare multi-discount card pricing API.
Make 2026 the year veterans have more control of their health care
The Veterans’ ACCESS Act would build off the success of the VA MISSION Act, add transparency, put more control in veterans’ hands, and provide accountability for VA staff to ensure vete…
PBMs hit by Trump transparency rule
Drug supply chain middlemen would have to disclose financial dealings with drugmakers, pharmacies and others.
Analysis: 5 early takeaways from the DOJ’s big Epstein files drop
The Justice Department on Friday announced the long-awaited release of an enormous tranche of Jeffrey Epstein files, spanning more than 3 million pages, which it said fufilled its obligations under transparency legislation passed last year.
Fighting for Stronger Political Transparency | IFES - The International Foundation for Electoral Systems
We stand ready to support all actors in strengthening the integrity of political finance around the world.
Investment and Statecraft: The International Politics of Sovereign Wealth Funds - Georgetown Journal of International Affairs
In 1953, Kuwait established the world’s first sovereign wealth fund to invest the country’s oil revenues and generate returns that would reduce its reliance on a single resource. Since then, over 100 separate funds have been created to preserve national wealth and ensure long-term fiscal sustainability. Today, they manage over $10 trillion in global assets. In this discussion with GJIA, political economist Kathryn Lavelle explains the increasingly novel dynamics that surround fund behavior and what the world can come to expect from their growing presence in international financial markets. GJIA: When it comes to the roles sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) play in global markets and politics, what would you say makes them unique? Kathryn Lavelle: Sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) operate on behalf of governments as investors. That in itself is a strange relationship. Within them, a core contest takes place between the state’s interests (or sovereign) part of the dynamic, and the money interests (or wealth) part of it, and these two aspects are frequently in contradiction, serving fundamentally different goals. SWFs are also quite fascinating because when you talk to the people who manage these funds, they have an interest in convincing you that the decisions are made almost exclusively on a financial basis—they really will go to great lengths to differentiate their government owners and those who make the management decisions. At the same time, these people ultimately answer to someone in power. Therefore, for most SWFs, it remains deeply unclear who is actually making the investment decisions and for what purposes. Of course, it is not always clear how other vehicles, such as hedge funds and private equity make the decisions they do, but I think what a lot of people find particularly disconcerting about SWFs is that they seem to act on behalf of people who have a different identity from their own. People who could be trying to manipulate politics and markets in a way that would have a long-term effect on their own populations. Regular investors come and go at will, and they only share an interest in profit as far as most of us understand. However, SWFs have that extra “sovereign” part right behind them that obscures their true interest. GJIA: These funds can be found in countries all across the globe, in both authoritarian states and democracies. Would you say SWFs differ in their goals and structures between regime-type? KL: It is not necessarily regime type that makes the goals and structures of SWFs different. It has to do with their economies. Let’s look at a country like China. There’s going to be a debate about exactly how to characterize the regime, but it is a country with many different kinds of sovereign wealth funds, and a particularly opaque state connection to each. At one time, some of the state-owned Chinese oil companies created specialized investment vehicles listed outside Chinese markets that excluded parts of the firms that were more associated with human rights violations. At the same time, the China Investment Corporation (CIC)—China’s largest SWF—draws a lot of concern, not necessarily because of its investment activities, but because of the dynamics of global politics. So, I wouldn’t really tie differences to regime types themselves in a wholesale way, but rather to how such funds are perceived and how they are structured. Saudi Arabia’s SWF is getting all kinds of attention for its involvement in Hollywood, and this takes me right back to when I was a student in the 1980s, when people were concerned about Japanese investment entities buying assets in Hollywood. They aren’t quite the same in financial terms, but it’s the same kind of concern about foreign investment that drives people to be suspicious, and the whole idea that “foreigners are influencing Hollywood.” This holds true across industries, and it reflects where politics are in places like the United States right now. One metric we can try to look at is transparency, where all the funds will tell you, “we are transparent.” The problem you’ll keep running into with this approach is how you value things. When trying to do comparative studies of equity markets, you’ll find that every country doesn’t use Generally Accepted Accounting Principles like we do in the United States. A fund may appear opaque politically and not want people to show what they’re invested in or what their intent with that investment is, but they could also just not be able to report it because of the way it was purchased, or the kinds of shares they purchased. There are some assets out there that really are difficult to put a monetary value on. GJIA: To what extent do domestic politics shape SWF behavior in both the investing “home” country and the recipient “host” country? KL: This depends on the type of fund present and also on the extent to which voters’ political views are able to influence the fund. For example, in a democratic home state like Norway, the SWF doesn’t invest in nuclear weapons or tobacco because of social concerns, but there is a continuing debate over whether it should invest in oil, even though that’s where most of the money comes from. The degree to which Norway will continue to make those investments, and whether they contradict the government’s overall climate goals, is an open question in Norwegian politics. Because of the way the fund’s governance is structured, it may not be easy to resolve. On the other hand, some people consider pension funds, like the State Teachers Retirement System (STRS) in Ohio, to be quasi-SWF. They have a very strict separation between the people who make up the management division and the fund owners. No teacher or professor would want to invest in things that may harm the future of their students. At the same time, a fund manager might see an opportunity in a diversified multinational corporation that offers a good return, despite it deriving part of its revenue from e-cigarettes. These contests are very apparent. Domestic politics can work in host countries too. A good example is Singapore’s SWF, Temasek, investing in Thailand’s telecommunications sector. If you study political economy, you already know that countries everywhere are uncomfortable with foreign ownership of their telecom sectors because a foreign entity could monitor or manipulate our communications with each other. In the case of Temasek, there was significant pushback from Thai citizens surrounding the deal, which went on to influence national political sentiment toward Singapore as a whole, underscoring the risks some SWFs may face with their investment choices. In this case, fund behavior led to the dissolution of the entire Thai government in 2006 and a subsequent coup d’état. GJIA: To address some of this unease, the Santiago Principles were established in 2009 to ostensibly promote trust and transparency. From your perspective, have these mechanisms actually changed fund behavior? KL: In international relations theory, we always like to have a clear set of norms and best practices—the orientation we want the proverbial ship to be going in. In that regard, the Santiago Principles at least got the discussion going about which direction SWFs should take at a time when people were very skittish about the growing size of these funds. Nobody wanted them to be out there and potentially destabilizing economies, so talks about disclosure, conditions for withdrawal, and the independence of managers were helpful when initiated. The biggest stumbling block was that there wasn’t exactly a good way to measure compliance with the Principles, let alone how to hold funds to them. If you read the Principles, they’re overall quite vague. In general, a fund doesn’t want to reveal how and why they make certain investment decisions because that information is proprietary—a fund makes money off of how and why it makes decisions—so how do you reconcile that with loosely-defined ideas of openness? Some decisions might have a political purpose. The bottom line is that trying to figure out and assign a score to compliance is not easy, and it is therefore the reason why the Santiago Principles never really got off the ground to the point where they could truly direct fund behavior. GJIA: Many emerging markets are looking to build their own SWFs from mineral and oil revenues. Historically, have funds shaped development trajectories in these countries? KL: I think the big story in international emerging markets investment is that the investment is increasingly no longer unidirectional. In the past multinational corporations of primarily Western background were the main form of foreign direct investment in a country. That has changed dramatically, to the point where you have companies from so-called “developing countries” taking over companies in the United States. Therefore, the landscape of international investment has changed, and I think SWFs are certainly a possibility to be the next step in the game. Historically, you didn’t need an entire financial vehicle to reinvest commodity revenues in your country, but as emerging markets get more financially sophisticated, their capacity to operate such funds has increased. SWFs would allow treasuries to move from relying on holding foreign exchange assets like cash or government bonds to having broader financial markets and targeted growth areas, while easing pressure on welfare expenditures. GJIA: With their increasing financial weight, do you see the presence of SWFs being a factor in the political choices leaders will have to make with regard to domestic and foreign policy? KL: It will depend on just how big the funds get. One of the reasons people are already apprehensive is because of their scale, and if certain SWFs in certain countries achieve a large-enough size, the presence will absolutely be cause for concern. The other factor political leaders will have to consider are their objectives. It’s not always clear how to define a SWF, or even where its activity is concentrated, but it is certainly a worry from the perspective of national security of opaque external investment. More than that, I think one of the most interesting questions going forward is whether the United States, the home to the world’s largest financial markets, will develop its own fund, for which the Trump administration announced a plan. There have also been several proposals in Congress. Were it to come into being, it would have tremendous weight. At the same time, one of the hallmarks of U.S. capitalism is a lack of government ownership of shares, so it would not be clear how such a fund would be received in domestic politics, or which direction it would take. Given how politically fragmented the country is, a Democratic administration would likely be concerned about different sectors of the economy, such as healthcare, and want investment there, rather than a Republican administration, which might prefer defense industries. No investment vehicle could thrive under conditions of such instability. Moreover, it remains unclear where the money to fund a theoretical U.S. SWF would come from. It would be a fundamentally different entity depending on whether it is financed with debt, economic surplus, commodities, or the sale of state companies, as in the case of Singapore. If it is debt, or government borrowing of some form, then the fund would have to outperform whatever the cost of that debt is, which is not an easy thing to do. I think our political leaders have enough on their plate. Our system has worked well keeping political and investment functions generally separate. We have seen different forms of business rise and fall, and even the perception of different countries, all of which funds are tied to. Unless a major SWF either starts—like in the case of the United States—or collapses—an issue that concerns the Saudis, I don’t see any political tsunamis on the horizon. . . . Kathryn Lavelle is the Ellen and Dixon Long Professor of World Affairs at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Her research explores the exchange between domestic and international and political institutions with a particular emphasis on political economy and multilateralism. Dr. Lavelle’s first book, The Politics of Equity Finance in Emerging Markets, explored the political circumstances that surround large issues of stock in the developing world. After being granted tenure at Case Western, she was awarded an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellowship and named the William A. Steiger fellow, a designation given to the most promising political scientist in her class of fellows. While in Washington during 2006-2007, she worked on the staff of the House Committee on Financial Services on issues related to domestic and international monetary policy. Dr. Lavelle holds a PhD in political science from Northwestern University; an M.A. in government and foreign affairs from the University of Virginia; and a bachelor’s degree in international economics from Georgetown University. She is a permanent member of the New York Council on Foreign Relations. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length. Interview conducted by Sid Mehrotra. Image Credit: Jason Leung, Unsplash Content Licenses, via Unsplash
Nudify app proliferation shows naked ambition of Apple and Google
: Researchers with the Tech Transparency Project found all sorts of apps that let users create fake non-consensual nudes of real people
Congress Should Prioritize Transparency and Accessibility in Live Entertainment Industry
January 27, 2026 The Honorable Marsha Blackburn Chairman Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Technology, and Data Privacy 357 Dirksen Senate Office Building Washington, DC 20515 The Honorable John Hickenlooper Ranking Member Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Technology, and Data Privacy 316 Hart Senate Office Building Washington, DC 20515 Chairman Blackburn, Ranking Membe, Author(s): Alexander Ciccone
ICYMI: Florida Releases Candy Testing Results Under Healthy Florida First Initiative - Florida Department of Health
Governor Ron DeSantis, First Lady Casey DeSantis, and Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo announced new food safety findings under the Healthy Florida First initiative, with the release of candy product testing results conducted by the Florida Department of Health to provide greater transparency for Florida families and strengthen accountability for products marketed to children.
Arsenic found in most candies tested under new 'Healthy Florida First' initiative
Florida reports arsenic in most candies tested, prompting DeSantis and health officials to push for transparency and safer products under Healthy Florida First.
Axios House: Trust presents the biggest challenge in health care AI, industry leaders say
Leaders in the health care and tech space said transparency, feedback and narrative play a crucial role in building provider and patient trust in AI
Rogers Victor: RFK Jr.’s first year at HHS
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promised transparency and a restoration of public health.
Louisiana health secretary's priorities for LDH: 'Zero-waste,' healthy food, 'radical transparency'
Louisiana Health Secretary Bruce Greenstein laid out a sweeping roadmap for the $21B Department of Health, promising tighter oversight, a new focus on nutrition and annual public accountability.
Moss Landing businesses unite to recover from battery facility fire's impact
Moss Landing businesses are slowly recovering from a fire's impact, with owners supporting each other and calling for greater transparency from plant officials.
Governor-elect Sherrill Nominates Dr. Raynard Washington to Serve as the Next Department of Health Commissioner
Today, Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill nominated Dr. Raynard Washington as the next Department of Health Commissioner. As Commissioner, Dr. Washington will work with the Gov.-elect to protect New Jerseyans’ access to affordable health care, bring transparency to health care pricing, and expand access to physical and mental healthcare, and lead critical public health initiatives for residents.[...]
Trump unveils health care plan aimed at lowering costs
President Donald Trump unveiled a multipart proposal on Thursday aimed at lowering prescription drug prices and reducing health insurance premiums, as well as increasing pricing transparency. He also vowed to hold big insurance companies accountable.
We need transparency in college sports
Given the explosive synergy between NIL contracts and the transfer portal, placing more restrictions on how players can transfer is a good first step to dampen the influence of NIL on college sport…
Proposed Regulation Pushes for More Price Transparency in Health Plans
On December 23, 2025, three federal agencies released a proposed rule to make costs more transparent in health plans. The proposal aligns with an executive order that President Donald Trump issued in February 2025 to enforce regulations requiring hospitals and health plans to make actual prices for medical services easier for employers and patients to access.
NASA chief reviews Orion heat shield, expresses “full confidence” in it for Artemis II
That level of openness and transparency is exactly what should be expected of NASA."
Power out in Burlingame business corridor after hazardous substance leaks into electric vaults
While Burlingame business owners say they understand there are outages due to the weather and other factors, they're demanding more transparency from PG&E.
Opinion | I’m a doctor. I shouldn’t receive better health care than patients.
Transparency in prices for medical treatment should be offered to everyone.
Why patients don’t care about health care prices
The U.S. health care system is unable to progress in pricing transparency due to the fact that most patients do not have a financial incentive to care about prices, as someone else is paying the bi…
Rolling back health AI transparency rule will shift the burden of vetting to health systems
A proposal to deregulate AI products used in health care would shift the burden of vetting those tools onto health systems.
Trump administration to scrap federal rule requiring transparency into health AI tools
The Trump administration wants to scrap rules that require developers to disclose how AI tools used to treat patients were developed and tested.
House passes narrow health care package; sets up a vote on EPTCs in January
The House yesterday passed the Lower Health Care Premiums for All Americans Act (H.R. 6703), legislation to expand association health plans, increase transparency requirements for pharmacy benefit managers, and fund cost-sharing reductions for some Health Insurance Marketplace enrollees. The measure advanced by a 216-211 vote and will now move to the Senate for consideration.
WATCH: Doctor-lawmaker blames Obamacare for driving health costs higher
House Republicans unveil healthcare bill promising to cut premiums by 11-12% through association health plans and transparency measures for all Americans, among other initiatives.
4 Ways You Can Turn Your Legacy Business Into a Modern Powerhouse
Businesses that blend traditional expertise with modern systems, transparency and customer education are gaining a powerful competitive edge.
Seattle passes new transparency law aimed at political consultants
The bill is Seattle City Council President Sara Nelson’s last as a member of the council and would target outgoing Mayor Bruce Harrell's unique advisor arrangement.
UNC Brewing Science Program Goes Down the Drain
The University of Northern Colorado has canceled its Brewing Laboratory Science program as part of 50 total staff layoffs implemented due to a projected $14 million budget shortfall, causing dismay among enrolled students. Sean Johnson, the program manager for eight years, who helped forge local commercial partnerships, has been laid off with his remaining classes moving online. Students praised the program's practical science and networking opportunities. Affected students expressed frustration over the lack of transparency, the university's prioritization of larger programs, and the sudden loss of learning opportunities and mentorship. UNC's Chemistry department stated the decision was part of university-wide budget cuts and is focused on supporting affected students.
Comcast’s Xfinity Launches National Video Plans; The Best Entertainment Experience for One Simple Price
Xfinity announced the launch of all-new video plans, designed to deliver simplicity, transparency, and unbeatable value for customers.
Video Amanda Anisimova: "More people should be watching women's sports"
ABC News' Stephanie Ramos spoke with rising tennis star Amanda Anisimova about her fast moving career, transparency about her mental health and shaping the future of women's tennis.
EU hits Elon Musk's X with $140 million fine over business practices
The fines were due to the platform's misleading use of blue check marks to identify verified users and a lack of transparency over ads and data access for researchers.
Global Fishing Watch and Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory launch Deep-Sea Mining Watch
The new global transparency tool will empower governments, researchers and civil society to monitor vessels involved in deep-sea mineral explorationWashington, D.C., United States, Dec. 04, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Global Fishing Watch, an international nonprofit organization advancing ocean governance through transparency of human activity at sea, and the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have unveiled an upgraded open-access portal designed to br
Feds promised "radical transparency" but are withholding rural health fund applications
Feds Promised ‘Radical Transparency’ but Are Withholding Rural Health Fund Applications
Proposals from states that have shared their applications to a new $50 billion rural health program include using drones to deliver medication, installing refrigerators to expand access to healthy produce, and bringing telehealth to libraries, day cares, and senior centers.