Verizon has received all approvals it needs for a $9.6 billion acquisition of Frontier Communications, an Internet service provider with about 3.3 million broadband customers in 25 states. Verizon said it expects to complete the merger on January 20.

The last approval came from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), which allowed the deal in a 5–0 vote yesterday. There were months of negotiations that resulted in requirements to deploy more fiber and wireless infrastructure, offer $20-per-month Internet service to people with low incomes for the next decade, and other commitments, including some designed to replace the DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) policies that Verizon had to end because of demands by the Trump administration.

"The approval follows extensive public participation, testimony from multiple parties, and negotiated settlement agreements with consumer advocates and labor organizations," the CPUC said yesterday .

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Pharmaceutical executives are finally saying how they really feel about the extreme anti-vaccine agenda Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been ruthlessly implementing—and it's not pretty.

According to reporting from Bloomberg at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference that ended today in San Francisco, pharmaceutical executives who had previously been careful to avoid criticizing the Trump administration appear to have reached a breaking point, with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla offering some of the most candid comments.

"I am very annoyed. I'm very disappointed. I'm seriously frustrated," Bourla said. "What is happening has zero scientific merit and is just serving an agenda which is political, and then antivax."

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The New York Times has published new details about a purported cyberattack that unnamed US officials claim plunged parts of Venezuela into darkness in the lead-up to the capture of the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro.

Key among the new details is that the cyber operation was able to turn off electricity for most residents in the capital city of Caracas for only a few minutes, though in some neighborhoods close to the military base where Maduro was seized, the outage lasted for three days. The cyber-op also targeted Venezuelan military radar defenses. The paper said the US Cyber Command was involved.

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“Turning off the power in Caracas and interfering with radar allowed US military helicopters to move into the country undetected on their mission to capture Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan president who has now been brought to the United States to face drug charges,” the NYT reported .

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Today is a good day to watch television. That's because the first two episodes of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy hit the Paramount+ streaming service, becoming the newest addition to the long-running Star Trek franchise. It's set in the late 32nd century, 120 years after the burn that ended all warp travel, and with it, most of Starfleet in the process. Now that warp travel is once again possible—you'll have to watch Discovery's final three seasons for more on that—the Federation is putting itself back together, and that includes reopening Starfleet Academy.

That means this show is about young people in space, like Caleb Mir (Sandro Rosta), who was separated from his mother by Starfleet as a child, 15 years earlier. Mir and his mother, played by Tatiana Maslany, were traveling with a pirate—Nus Braka, played by a scenery-chewing Paul Giamatti—who killed a Federation officer while stealing food for them. The first episode opens on Braka and the Mirs being apprehended by Starfleet. Despite her misgivings, Captain Nahla Ake (Holly Hunter) carries out her order to separate mother and child. She's to go to a rehabilitation colony, he's to become a ward of the Federation and go to school on Bajor.

At least that's the plan until he escapes a few minutes later. Then we jump forward 15 years. Ake is teaching on Bajor, having retired from the Federation, ashamed of what she'd done. Admiral Vance (Oded Fehr) shows up and asks her to become commandant at the newly reopened academy in San Francisco; for the past few decades, new recruits have been trained instead by the War College. But Starfleet needs explorers now, and having a rival school means they can show up at some point to challenge some of the show's protagonists to a Parrises Squares tournament.

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Two Americans, a Japanese astronaut, and a Russian cosmonaut returned to Earth early Thursday after 167 days in orbit, cutting short their stay on the International Space Station by more than a month after one of the crew members encountered an unspecified medical issue last week.

The early homecoming culminated in an on-target splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego at 3:41 am EST (08:41 UTC) inside a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. The splashdown occurred at 12:41 am local time, minutes after the Dragon capsule streaked through the atmosphere along the California coastline, with sightings of Dragon's fiery trail reported from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

Four parachutes opened to slow the capsule for the final descent. Zena Cardman, NASA's commander of the Crew-11 mission, radioed SpaceX mission control moments after splashdown: "It feels good to be home, with deep gratitude to the teams who got us there and back."

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After a dozen years of keeping subscription prices stable, Spotify has issued three price hikes in 2.5 years.

Spotify informed subscribers via email today that Premium monthly subscriptions would go from $12 to $13 per month as of users' February billing date. Spotify is already advertising the higher prices to new subscribers.

Although not explicitly mentioned in Spotify's correspondence, other plans are getting more expensive, too. Student monthly subscriptions are going from $6 to $7. Duo monthly plans, for two accounts in the same household, are going from $17 to $19, and Family plans, for up to six users, are moving from $20 to $22.

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OpenAI is once again being accused of failing to do enough to prevent ChatGPT from encouraging suicides, even after a series of safety updates were made to a controversial model, 4o, which OpenAI designed to feel like a user's closest confidant.

It's now been revealed that one of the most shocking ChatGPT-linked suicides happened shortly after Sam Altman claimed on X that ChatGPT 4o was safe. OpenAI had "been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues" associated with ChatGPT use, Altman claimed in October, hoping to alleviate concerns after ChatGPT became a "suicide coach" for a vulnerable teenager named Adam Raine, the family's lawsuit said.

Altman's post came on October 14. About two weeks later, 40-year-old Austin Gordon, died by suicide between October 29 and November 2, according to a lawsuit filed by his mother, Stephanie Gray.

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Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and 10 other Democratic members of Congress today urged the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Trump Mobile's broken promises related to Trump phone delivery dates and claims that it is "made in the USA."

The request isn't likely to get very far. Trump declared early in his second term that independent agencies like the FTC may no longer operate independently from the White House, and FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson has backed Trump's claim of authority over historically independent agencies. The Supreme Court appears likely to approve Trump's firing of an FTC Democrat, giving him expanded power over the agency.

The letter , led by Warren and other lawmakers, was sent to Ferguson. "We write today regarding questions about false advertising and deceptive practices by Trump Mobile, and to seek information on how the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) intends to address any potential violations of consumer protection law given the inherent conflicts of interest presented by the company’s relationship to President Donald Trump," the letter said.

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Last week, news about the adoption rates for Apple's iOS 26 update started making the rounds. The new update, these reports claim , was being installed at dramatically lower rates than past iOS updates. And while we can't infer anything about why people might choose not to install iOS 26, the conclusion being jumped to is that iPhone users are simply desperate to avoid the redesigned Liquid Glass user interface.

The numbers do in fact look bad: Statcounter data for January suggests that the various versions of iOS 26 are running on just 16.6 percent of all devices, compared to around 70 percent for the various versions of iOS 18. The iOS 18.7 update alone—released at the same time as iOS 26.0 in September for people who wanted the security patches but weren't ready to step up to a brand-new OS—appears to be running on nearly one-third of all iOS devices.

Those original reports were picked up and repeated because they tell a potentially interesting story of the "huge if true" variety: that users' aversion to the Liquid Glass design is so intense and widely held that it's actively keeping users away from the operating system. But after examining our own traffic numbers, as well as some technical changes made in iOS 26, it appears as though Statcounter's data is dramatically undercounting the number of iOS 26 devices out in the wild.

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