Figure Skaters at the 2026 Winter Olympics Are Pushing the Limits of What's Possible For years, quad axel jumps seemed impossible. Then Ilia Malinin landed one in 2022. As he heads to the Milano Cortina Games everyone wants to know what's next. In 2021, famed Russian figure skating coach Alexei Mishin said that no figure skater would ever be able to successfully perform a quad axel in his lifetime. The following year, two-time Olympic gold medalist Yuzuru Hanyu was training to master the jump, but when he attempted it at the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing, he fell short of finishing the four-and-a-half revolutions in the air. Mishin's pronouncement, it seemed, had been validated.

Current approaches to community detection in social networks often ignore the spatial location of the nodes. In this paper, we look to extract spatially-near communities in a social network. We introduce a new metric to measure the quality of a community partition in a geolocated social networks called "spatially-near modularity" a value that increases based on aspects of the network structure but decreases based on the distance between nodes in the communities. We then look to find an optimal partition with respect to this measure - which should be an "ideal" community with respect to both social ties and geograpic location. Though an NP-hard problem, we introduce two heuristic algorithms that attempt to maximize this measure and outperform non-goegrpahic community finding by an order of magnitude.

The UK's national security boss, Robert Hannigan, should come clean on surveillance and stop attacking technology companies, privacy experts have said. Intelligence agencies must use the debate sparked by Edward Snowden's surveillance revelations to overhaul their attitude to privacy and oversight, said the group speaking at Dublin's Web Summit in November. "What's urgently required is a real cultural shift amongst our politicians and among our civil servants in Whitehall as to the value of privacy: the fact that it's a public and social good, and it's a collective good as well," said Bella Sankey, policy director at civil liberties organisation Liberty. Sankey, speaking alongside the former MI5 intelligence officer and whistleblower Annie Machon, criticised Hannigan for his attack on technology companies, in which he claimed were "in denial" about the misuse of the internet by terrorists, and that "privacy has never been an absolute right". "Given everything we've learnt in the past 18 months, he chose not to address at all the very serious things that GCHQ stand accused of: blanket surveillance of the UK population with public knowledge and without parliamentary knowledge, [and] receiving warrantless bulk intercepts from the NSA on US and people around the world," said Machon.

The head of Britain's digital espionage agency has apologized for the organization's historic prejudice against homosexuals, saying it failed to learn from the treatment of World War II codebreaker Alan Turing. In a rare public speech, GCHQ chief Robert Hannigan told a gathering organized by the rights group Stonewall that the agency's ban on homosexuals had caused long-lasting psychological damage to many and hurt the agency because talented people were excluded from working there. "The fact that it was common practice for decades reflected the intolerance of the times and the pressures of the Cold War, but it does not make it any less wrong and we should apologize for it," Hannigan said Friday at the conference organized by Stonewall, which campaigns for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality. The speech offered a poignant tribute to Turing, the gay computer science pioneer and architect of the effort to crack Nazi Germany's Enigma cipher. Turing was convicted of indecency in 1952 and stripped of his security clearance.

Not letting gay people work for GCHQ until the 1990s was wrong and was the "nation's loss", the UK intelligence agency's boss Robert Hannigan has said. He also said the treatment of gay computer pioneer and code breaker Alan Turing had been "horrifying". GCHQ now relies on people who "dare to be different", he told a conference hosted by gay rights group Stonewall. Mr Hannigan said no-one could not know what some of those sacked for being gay would have gone on to achieve. In his speech in London, Mr Hannigan said a former spy he called Ian, who was forced out of the service on suspicion of being gay in the 1960s, had urged him to apologise.