News The Insider February 3, 2026 Jeffrey Epstein The publication of more than three million pages of documents in the case of financier Jeffrey Epstein, convicted of sex crimes and hanged himself in prison, has forced people who were not previously involved in this scandal to justify themselves: from high-ranking officials to members of royal families and billionaires.

The RAS approved the updated composition of the Commission for Combating Pseudoscience and Falsification of Scientific Research, as academician Robert Nigmatulin, a member of the RAS Presidium, told RTVI. It will be led by Alexander Gliko, who took over as Chairman of the Commission in November last year. The publication also managed to obtain a complete list of participants in the updated Commission.

US President Donald Trump is creating a strategic reserve of critical minerals with an initial capital of $12 billion in an attempt to protect American producers from supply disruptions and reduce the country's dependence on Chinese rare earth metals and other strategic resources, Bloomberg reports . The initiative, called Project Vault, will combine $1.67 billion in private capital with a $10 billion loan from the U.S.

The prosecutor's office of Cherepovets, Vologda region, conducted a similar inspection and also found the forced transfer of school chats to Mach a violation. In the summer of 2025, a federal law was adopted on the creation of a “multifunctional information exchange service”, written for the Max application. The media wrote about many cases where employees of budgetary organizations and students were forced to install this messenger on their smartphones.

The United States shot down an Iranian drone heading towards the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, and armed Iranian boats tried to stop the American-flagged ship in the Persian Gulf, The Wall Street Journal reports . The aircraft carrier was about 800 km off the southern coast of Iran when the Iranian Shahed 139 drone began to approach the ship and continued to move even after US forces “took steps to de-escalate,” US Navy spokesman Tim Hawkins said.

The French offices of Elon Musk's social network X (Twitter) were searched. The Paris prosecutor's office reported this on its Twitter. The operation was carried out by members of the prosecutor's office's cybercrime unit, with the assistance of the European Union Police Service (Europol) and the French police cybercrime unit. The searches took place as part of an investigation that began in January 2025.

Russian authorities are considering the possibility of tightening the rules for exporting cash rubles abroad. As the Interfax agency writes with reference to the draft presidential decree, it will be possible to export cash rubles equivalent to more than $10 thousand only through international airports. Restrictions will apply to the export of cash to the EAEU countries (Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan).

The Polish Ministry of Defense announced the detention of its employee on suspicion of working for the intelligence of a foreign state. As follows from the statement, the arrest took place on February 3 at the department’s headquarters in Warsaw. The case is being investigated by military counterintelligence. The Defense Ministry statement did not name the suspect or the country for which he was allegedly spying.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in a conversation with US President Donald Trump, agreed to refuse purchases of Russian oil. In exchange, Washington will cancel increased trade tariffs on New Delhi. The American leader himself wrote about this on his social network Truth Social: “He [Narendra Modi] agreed to stop purchasing Russian oil and significantly increase purchases from the United States and possibly Venezuela.

A former assistant to Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and creator of an empire for smuggling and sexual exploitation of people, including minors, told the FBI that it was he who introduced Donald Trump to his future wife Melania. This is stated in a document released on Friday as part of a large-scale publication of three million pages of materials from the Epstein case. The woman testified in July 2019, three days after Epstein's arrest.

For the first time in history, the Perseverance rover has traveled on another planet along a route developed by artificial intelligence, NASA reports . The tests took place on December 8 and 10, 2025, under the direction of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California. The demonstration used Anthropic's Claude AI model to create waypoints for the rover, a complex decision-making task typically performed manually by mission planners.

The British data protection regulator has launched an official investigation into the activities of the chatbot Grok, developed by Elon Musk's company xAI, reports Reuters. The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) is reviewing how the service handles users' personal data and whether it is being used to produce harmful sexual content, including images and videos.

Poland’s Defense Ministry reported earlier today that one of its employees has been detained on suspicion of working for a foreign intelligence service. According to the statement , the arrest took place on Feb. 3 at the ministry’s headquarters in Warsaw. The case is being investigated by the country’s Military Counterintelligence Service. The ministry did not disclose the suspect’s name or the country he is alleged to have spied for.

The new owner of Domodedovo Airport announced staff reductions, Kommersant writes . According to the newspaper, they are being asked to leave without compensation or be transferred to other positions with loss of income. Domodedovo General Director Andrei Ivanov announced plans to optimize staff the day after the airport was sold at auction.

In Irkutsk Bodaibo, where almost 1.3 thousand residents have been left without heat and water for the fifth day, the authorities promise to start heating in the first houses. Governor Igor Kobzev at a meeting of the emergency commission reported on the progress of restoration work in forty-degree frosts.