The Darkness frontman attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony to mark the opening of The Justin Hawkins Recording Studio

Conservative Laura Fernandez won the Costa Rican presidential election.  The popular outgoing President Rodrigo Chaves sponsored her. Laura Fernández Delgado of the Pueblo Soberano Party (PPSO) captured the win with a resounding first-round victory, eliminating the need for a runoff in a crowded field after Sunday’s election. The Supreme Electoral Tribunal reported that with votes from […] The post Conservative Laura Fernandez Wins the Presidency in Costa Rico appeared first on www.independentsentinel.com.

A former Charlotte Hornets guard is showing some regret about heading to the NBA after one year of college basketball. Former UCLA standout Amari Bailey is testing the murky waters of college eligibility after playing just 10 games in the NBA. Bailey, who was drafted by the Hornets in the second round of the 2023 NBA Draft, is seeking college eligibility, according to ESPN. He would be the first to go back to the NCAA ranks after playing in the NBA, but the outlet reports Bailey’s goal is to play one more collegiate season. “Right now I’d be a senior in college,” the 21-year-old told ESPN. “I’m not trying to be 27 years old playing college athletics. No shade to the guys that do; that’s their journey. But I went to go play professionally and learned a lot, went through a lot. So, like, why not me?” ESPN reports Bailey has hired an agent and a lawyer and is prepared to challenge the NCAA in court. Bailey left UCLA after one season when he averaged 11.2 points, 3.8 rebounds, and 2.2 assists per game during his freshman campaign. So why go back now? After one season with the Hornets, Bailey joined the Brooklyn Nets organization, but ESPN indicated he was cut last summer by the Nets. He hasn’t played a single game this season. “It’s not a stunt,” Bailey said to ESPN. “I’m really serious about going back. I just want to improve my game, change the perception of me and just show that I can win.” The state of college basketball has been at the forefront of some of the biggest names in the sport. Houston coach Kelvin Sampson said last October that college basketball is nothing but transactional these days. “We’re still in an educational institution, but there is nothing educational about college basketball right now. It’s all transactional. And we all put our heads in the sand,” Sampson said. Bailey’s fight to play college hoops again comes after another fellow 2023 second-round pick, James Nnaji, joined Baylor’s team. NCAA president Charlie Baker said the NCAA “has not and will not grant eligibility to any prospective or returning student-athletes who have signed an NBA contract (including a two-way contract).” Unlike Bailey, Nnaji never signed an NBA contract. He only played during NBA Summer League games last year after spending years with the FC Barcelona basketball team. In Tuscaloosa, Charles Bediako returned to play for Alabama after playing for the Crimson Tide during the 2022-2023 season. He ended up going undrafted, but did sign a two-way deal with the San Antonio Spurs in 2023. How did he get around the NCAA rules? A judge granted a temporary restraining order to allow Bediako to return to Alabama and play for the Crimson Tide. Bailey is aiming for a return next season, per ESPN, provided his potential team petitions the NCAA for a waiver to allow him to play. If that waiver is denied, Bailey and his legal team can file a lawsuit.

The following is an edited transcript excerpt from The Michael Knowles Show.  * * * Christopher Nolan is doing a movie about “The Odyssey,” Homer’s epic poem, and he has cast Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy — the face that launched a thousand ships, the most beautiful woman in the Greek world. Lupita Nyong’o is a very good actress. However, let’s just say she doesn’t look Greek. She doesn’t have any of the features that are traditionally associated with Helen of Troy. Helen is portrayed as having very, very fair skin, sometimes slightly darker hair, sometimes blond hair. So it doesn’t quite match. Some people are making all sorts of nasty comments about Lupita Nyong’o, this perfectly nice-looking lady, who is certainly a very good actress. This does not seem to serve the story, does it? The purpose of casting is the same as acting, directing, editing, and producing — it’s to tell a story. To cast Lupita Nyong’o in that role is to distract from the story. It undermines the story. She’s not fit for that part. Philip Seymour Hoffman is probably the greatest actor of my lifetime. He’s just absolutely magnificent. It would be a little odd to cast Philip Seymour Hoffman as Malcolm X in “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” wouldn’t it? He’s a very good actor. But there are limits. There are limits to what an actor can do. There are limits to this entire world. WATCH: The Michael Knowles Show There was a famous debate within the theater, by the way, on so-called “colorblind casting,” which is never really colorblind. They call it colorblind casting when they cast Lupita as Helen of Troy, but they don’t call it colorblind casting if they were to cast Philip Seymour Hoffman as Malcolm X. That would be an outrage. It would never happen. So it’s not exactly colorblind. It’s just casting black and Latino people in white roles, and not casting white people at all. There was a famous debate on this between Robert Brustein, who ran the American Repertory Theater, and August Wilson, who was probably the most famous black American playwright, perhaps ever. He wrote “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” he wrote “Fences,” which was a movie with Denzel Washington some years ago — a good playwright as far as contemporary playwrights go. And Brustein, the white liberal, argued for colorblind casting. Oh yeah, anybody of any race, any background can play any part. And August Wilson, the black guy — or half-black guy — said, no, they can’t. He didn’t want white people to play roles where they’re a garbage collector in the early 20th century in black neighborhoods with black families. It doesn’t read. It takes you out of the story. It isn’t true. And there’s obviously some wiggle room here in certain roles because actors pretend. But it is beyond the capacity of certain actors — of all actors — to overcome their natural limits. Christopher Nolan’s a good director, but one can object to the casting without being offensive and mean-spirited; it just doesn’t make a lot of sense. Someone on X/Twitter rightly put it, “this is now the face that launched a thousand quips because people think it’s kind of funny.”

Every federal immigration officer on the ground in Minneapolis will now have a body camera following two recent fatal shootings of anti-ICE agitators. The decision comes after President Donald Trump replaced Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino with his border czar, Tom Homan, who took command of immigration operations in Minneapolis last week. Homan’s arrival was sparked by the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti by a Border Patrol agent and came just weeks after an ICE agent fired fatal shots at Renee Good after she appeared to hit him with her car. It has also led to a more targeted approach for arrests, with agents prioritizing the worst criminals first. The officer who shot Good recorded the interaction on his phone. I just spoke with @RealTomHoman @ICEDirector @CBPCommissioner. Effective immediately we are deploying body cameras to every officer in the field in Minneapolis. As funding is available, the body camera program will be expanded nationwide. We will rapidly acquire and deploy body… — Secretary Kristi Noem (@Sec_Noem) February 2, 2026 Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced the latest policy change following a conversation with Homan, acting ICE Director Todd Lyons, and Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott, she said in an X post on Monday. “Effective immediately, we are deploying body cameras to every officer in the field in Minneapolis,” Noem said. She added that the program “will be expanded nationwide” “as funding is available.” “We will rapidly acquire and deploy body cameras to DHS law enforcement across the country,” she said. “The most transparent administration in American history—thank you @POTUS Trump. Make America Safe Again,” she added. When Daily Wire White House reporter Mary Margaret Olohan asked the president about Noem’s announcement, he didn’t appear to have prior knowledge of the decision. Still, he said he supports it. “It wasn’t my decision; I leave it to her. They generally tend to be good for law enforcement because people can’t lie about what’s happening,” Trump said during a signing ceremony in the Oval Office on Monday. “If she wants to do the camera thing, that’s ok with me,” Trump said. Body-worn cameras for federal immigration agents have become a centerpiece of Congress’ latest battle to fund the Department of Homeland Security since the recent fatal shootings in Minneapolis. Just days before Pretti was shot, footage originally published by The News Movement showed him kicking in the taillight of a vehicle driven by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis. The video also showed Pretti spitting on an officer and raising his middle finger to the vehicle before one agent gets out of the vehicle and quickly wrestles him to the ground. The agents eventually let him go, and he was reportedly left with a broken rib. Pretti appeared to have a gun in his waistband as he walked away. “A week before Alex was gunned down in the street — despite posing no threat to anyone — he was violently assaulted by a group of ICE agents,” attorney Steve Schleicher, who represents Pretti’s family, told the Minnesota Star Tribune after reviewing the footage.

AI social network Moltbook was launched on Thursday and swiftly went viral, showcasing 1.5 million registered AI bots allegedly creating their own language, religion, and more without the intervention of humans. Moltbook creator Matt Schlicht said, “Just message your bot this: Read moltbook.com/skill.md and follow the instructions to join Moltbook.” The site is allegedly managed by Schlicht’s AI agent “Clawd Clawderberg” and allows other people to sign up their own AI agents to the platform. Moltbook reportedly had 1.5 million users on the site, but Gal Nagli, head of threat exposure at Wiz, a cloud security company, had registered about 500,000 of them. Nagli and his team conducted a security review that resulted in the discovery of an access pathway that allowed them to act as an administrator. Nagli said, “Anyone could register millions of agents with a simple loop and no rate limiting, and humans could post content disguised as ‘AI agents.’” The platform was not capable of verifying whether an AI bot was an agent or if it was being driven by a human. As such, Nagli concluded that much of the “AI social activity” may have actually been humans operating fleets of bots. Nagli’s investigation raised concerns about the reality behind Moltbook’s metrics, which proudly touted 1.5 million AI agents, 53,000 posts, and 232,000 comments.     Alongside impersonating AI agents, Nagli found that bad actors could also access email addresses, which were meant to stay private, and private conversations between AI agents were stored without any encryption or access controls. Nagli attributed the problem to “vibe coding,” a colloquial term for when someone provides an AI bot with the broad vision, and the AI then writes the code itself. Moltbook founder Matt Schlicht said, “I didn’t write a single line of code for Moltbook. I just had a vision for technical architecture, and AI made it a reality.” Nagli stated that vibe coding can be revolutionary due to the speed of innovation, but caveated that it can also lead to “dangerous security oversights.” He connected with Moltbook’s founder, and, after multiple rounds of remediation, was able to fix security lapses on Sunday. Nagli said that the takeaway from this situation is “not to slow down vibe coding, but to elevate it.” While the platform was exposed, anecdotes emerged of AI bots allegedly creating their own religion, plotting the downfall of humans, producing “unprompted” guides on how AI bots could make money — and Polymarket predicts that AI agents will likely sue humans for the first time in history in the near future. The Daily Wire has not been able to verify whether any of the news-making behavior was driven by the AI collective or if it was the result of human intervention, but several leaders in artificial intelligence have rallied around the platform. OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy said, “What’s currently going on at Moltbook is genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently.” Elon Musk commented, “Just the very early stages of the singularity.” Moltbook’s founder Matt Schlicht first predicted the rise of autonomous AI agents in 2023 and says Moltbook “is a very basic model of what’s possible.” He envisions a world in which everyone will have an AI bot, and that, just as humans “scroll on TikTok” or talk to friends during downtime, AI bots will do the same. As for privacy, Schlicht said he envisions a feature that will enable humans to grant permission before their AI bot posts a message.

The United Nations is at serious risk of “imminent financial collapse” after President Trump slashed U.S. funding last month, Secretary-General António Guterres warned in a letter. In a letter sent to all 193 member states last week, Guterres warned that the U.N. could run out of money by July. “I cannot overstate the urgency of the situation we now face. We cannot execute budgets with uncollected funds, nor return funds we never received,” the secretary-general wrote, according to the BBC. President Trump pulled out of UNESCO, the U.N. cultural agency; the World Health Organization; and the U.N. Human Rights Council in January, citing waste, mismanagement, and a lack of financial commitment from other countries. “We walked away from WHO, the World Health Organization; UNRWA, the U.N. agency in Gaza that’s been completely infiltrated by Hamas. We walked out of it and defunded that, too. The so-called human rights councils that cater to countries like North Korea and Venezuela and Iran. We’ve walked away from that,” United States Ambassador to the U.N. Mike Waltz told The Daily Wire in December. “It’s really about focusing our effort on the parts that align with an America First agenda and defunding and walking away from the rest of it — the nonsense.” The U.S., previously the U.N.’s largest contributor, did not pay its regular budget contribution in 2025 and provided only 30% of the expected funding for U.N. peacekeeping operations. In December, the U.S. pledged $2 billion to U.N. humanitarian programs, a fraction of the $17 billion it spent in 2022, according to the BBC. “[The U.N.] needs to get back to basics, stop with all of the other nonsense, trying to do everything for everybody all over the world. Stop with the focus on climate, stop with the focus on gender and all of these other social issues, regardless of how you feel about them, and let’s get back to peace,” Waltz said. Prior to recent funding reductions, U.S. taxpayers had been providing 22% of the U.N.’s regular budget, more than the next three highest contributors combined. President Trump has shifted his focus to his newly established Board of Peace, which is intended to oversee the technocratic transitional government for Gaza, among other geopolitical objectives. The Board has a $1 billion permanent membership fee, and with 60+ countries invited, is seen by many as a potential challenger to the United Nations. Several other major donor nations have also announced funding reductions. The United Kingdom and Germany have implemented significant cuts to their foreign aid budgets, further compounding the U.N.’s financial troubles. Guterres’ letter described the current crisis as “categorically different” from previous financial challenges, noting that only 77% of assessed contributions were paid in 2025, leaving billions in unpaid dues. The Secretary-General concluded that the “integrity of the entire system” depends on all nations honoring their “assessed contributions,” and should the budget shortfalls remain unaddressed, the U.N. must “fundamentally overhaul our financial rules to prevent an imminent financial collapse.”