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After eight years of development, the UK Home Office’s new system for managing immigration and asylum applications is failing to help the department learn from the politically sensitive appeals process. According to a report from Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, the number of appeals to decisions on asylum status has rocketed from 8,000 in 2022-23 to well over 29,000 in 2023-24. However, the new case management system, Atlas, which completed its handover from the legacy Casework Information Database (CID) in 2025, isn't helping case workers learn from the outcome of past appeals. "Since the transition from CID to Atlas, it had not been possible for the Home Office to provide data or feedback on the outcome of asylum appeals to [decision-makers]. Although local workarounds had been implemented, this shortcoming with Atlas had hindered the ability to identify and monitor trends and to learn effectively from appeals,” the report said. The report, which covered the period from June to December 2025, said the Home Office's work “to resolve this was ongoing but required a full rebuild of other platforms.” It was expected to finish the work by the end of 2025, the inspector’s report said. The Register has asked the Home Office whether it has completed this remediation work. In 2025, the Home Office said Atlas completed its replacement of CID — the legacy system began its development in 2000. The Home Office was described Atlas’ development as an eight year journey after the complex project had to cope with global events such as Brexit, Covid, the Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme and the Ukraine Citizens Schemes. Atlas was built by suppliers including Accenture, Mastek and PA Consulting. Contracts, with work starting from 2020, were valued at around £79.7 million. As of 2019, it was projected to be fully implemented in 2021. However the Home Office missed that deadline. In 2023, The Register revealed the Home Office had missed a second deadline for the full hand-over and decommissioning of CID. At the time, the Home Office told spending watchdog the National Audit Office that it would stop using CID by September 2023. But the department missed that deadline too. As of December 2025, there remained evidence that Home Office staff were still using the legacy system for some information. As of June 2026, a report from the Public Accounts Committee, Parliament’s spending watchdog, confirmed the department no longer used the legacy system, although it found staff did need to maintain their own spreadsheets along side the official system. ®

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In May, the Department of Education finalized its framework under the “ Reimagining and Improving Student Education ” (RISE) rules and made a technical distinction that carries life-or-death stakes for the American health care system. By capping annual federal borrowing for standard graduate students at $20,500 while preserving a $50,000 threshold for an exclusive list of 11 “professional” degrees, the administration attempted to use a balanced ledger to codify a dangerous misunderstanding of modern medicine. The new caps go into effect Wednesday.

A lawsuit filed by the American Nurses Association (ANA) and nine other national nursing organizations highlights a glaring absurdity: Under the new framework, an aspiring chiropractor qualifies for maximum federal borrowing, while advanced practice nurse practitioners (NP) and physician assistants (PA), both key to fulfilling existing and anticipated shortages in primary care and rural health nationwide, are locked out. Further, growing fields like cardiovascular perfusionists, more and more involved in ICU care, field resuscitation, organ preservation, and other support roles, remain unrecognized.

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The Make America Healthy Again movement wants for no enemies.

For the past two years, seed oils, sugary drinks, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and childhood vaccines — and the industries behind them — have been subjected to unprecedented scrutiny. Yet MAHA’s quest to vanquish the root causes of chronic disease has omitted an obvious foe: alcohol.

Though drinking causes more deaths in the U.S. each year than infectious diseases and opioids combined, the movement and its leader, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have largely sidestepped alcohol.

STAT’s investigation finds that the Trump administration has downplayed alcohol’s risks and actively derailed efforts to understand and prevent drinking-related harms, all while doing favors for the expansive alcohol industry.

Even Kennedy, who has professed a deep interest in fixing the nation’s patchy addiction-treatment infrastructure, has offered no plan for dealing specifically with the country’s favorite drug. Most of his investments so far focus on opioids or specifically on homeless Americans, and pay little attention to excessive alcohol use in the broader population.

To date, the administration’s most noteworthy actions on alcohol have consisted of burying a report that concluded light drinking poses risks; eliminating over half the staff at a federal agency focused on substance use; closing the alcohol program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and altering dietary guidelines to eliminate suggested drinking limits. That erasure is rippling through government: The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism removed information about the health risks of moderate drinking from its website in January, according to archived versions of the page.

“If you’re truly committed to improving all of these different ills in society, and you’re going to stay blind to alcohol, you’re not really that committed to it,” said Mike Marshall, CEO of the U.S. Alcohol Policy Alliance, a key nonpartisan nonprofit working on the issue.

Continue to STAT+ to read the full story…

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Fable will feature a repopulation system if players murder too many NPCs

Playground Games originally thought about letting players live with the consequences of their actions

It decided the absence of NPCs would ruin some of the game's other systems

Playground Games has confirmed that if Fable players, for some reason, decide to kill every non-player character (NPC) in a settlement, they will repopulate over time.

During a press Q&A at an Xbox event adjacent to this year's Summer Game Fest (SGF) attended by TechRadar Gaming, associate game director Will Kennedy discussed Fable 's reactive world, including the permanence of player actions. As a role-playing game (RPG), decisions will impact the NPCs around you, and players will have a reputation that will be remembered through their actions.

Player actions will also have consequences and be remembered, but if players decide to go on a killing spree, NPCs will later respawn through the game's repopulation system.

In fact, Playground originally thought about letting players live with this decision; however, it ultimately decided that the absence of so many NPCs would spoil other systems.

"In terms of killing NPCs, you can kill every NPC in a settlement, and the settlement will stay empty for some time," Kennedy explained. "But we do have a system that begins to repopulate in a settlement as well, but the reason that we do that is, we thought about it, there was a school of thought where you just live with that consequence literally forever, but we also thought in doing that it would cut off a lot of systems to players.

"It would be cool [at] first, but then it might actually get a bit annoying, so we may make the choice to prevent that."

We followed up with Playground Games after the event and received the following from game director and general manager of Playground Games, Ralph Fulton, on how repopulation will work: "The new NPCs who, over time, repopulate a settlement to replace NPCs who have sadly died (i.e., were killed by you…) will be full NPCs like the ones they’re replacing. They’ll have all the elements that all our Living Population NPCs have – name, job, traits, home, clothing, appearance and yes, voice – and will be fully functional in all the same ways.

In the same Xbox event interview, Fulton revealed that Fable will feature over 150,000 lines of dialogue , and over 1000 hours of voice-over were recorded this year alone.

"We've had multiple studios set up running in parallel for over 1000 hours just this year alone, just recording VO," he said, "so it's a huge machine, because the vision that the guys have for this part of the game just requires that way of writing."

Fable will officially launch on February 23, 2027, for PlayStation 5 , Xbox Series X , Series S , and PC.

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QUICK FACTS

Where is it? Toussidé volcano, Chad [ 21.03731548, 16.47357325 ]

What's in the photo? The petrified remains of ancient lava and a skull-like caldera

Who took the photo? An unnamed astronaut on board the International Space Station

When was it taken? Sept. 23, 2019

This eye-catching satellite snap shows off a sprawling mass of petrified lava surrounding the jet-black slopes of a potentially dangerous volcano in the heart of the Sahara. A smaller volcanic "skull" lurks near the shadowy peak's base.

Toussidé (also known as Tarso Toussidé) is a "potentially active" stratovolcano located within the Tibesti Mountains, which cover around 40,000 square miles (100,000 square kilometers) of northern Chad and southern Libya. The dark peak stands 10,712 feet (3,265 meters) above sea level, making it the second-tallest mountain in the Tibesti region.

The name Toussidé roughly translates to " which killed the local people with fire " in the language of the nearby Indigenous people, hinting at a destructive and deadly history. However, according to the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program , there is no evidence that the volcano has erupted during the Holocene — the current geological epoch, which began around 12,000 years ago. It is unclear if it has actually killed anyone.

The dark blob surrounding the volcano is known as a massif. It is made up of layers of overlapping magmatic rock left by multiple ancient lava flows that effusively erupted, or slowly poured from, the volcano's summit.

The shadowy structure, which is up to 20 miles (32 kilometers) across at its widest point, stands out against the surrounding sand-covered plateau, which has been carved into a network of crisscrossing canyons by eons of wind blasting, according to NASA's Earth Observatory .

The massif surrounding Toussidé is made of overlapping lava flows. If you look closely at this image, you can see how they criss-cross over one another. The Trou au Natron caldera is also more clearly visible in this photo, which was captured by the European Space Agency's Copernicus satellite in September 2021. (Image credit: ESA/Copernicus) Just southeast of the massif (in the upper right of the photo), there is a small, white circle containing several dark patches. This is Trou au Natron — a roughly 3,300-foot-deep (1,000 m) volcanic crater, or caldera, which looks eerily like a giant skull when viewed directly from above.

The cranium-like caldera likely formed during an explosive eruption more than 120,000 years ago. It was once filled with a giant salt lake that was home to ancient algae and other microorganisms. When the lake dried out, around the start of the Holocene, the receding water left behind a thick layer of white salt surrounding a pair of eyelike volcanic cones.

Toussidé is one of the youngest mountains in the Tibesti range, which formed by similar effusive eruptions long before the stratovolcano was born. The entire region likely once matched the massif's dark hue before being relentlessly bombarded by sand and wind. In another 100,000 years or so, the massif may blend in with the surrounding plateau, according to the Earth Observatory.

Trou au Natron's salty white floor and volcanic cones make it look eerily like a skull when viewed from above. The dark slopes of Toussidé can also be seen in the background of this image. (Image credit: Gerhard Holub/Wikimedia) While the shadowy volcano has remained dormant for several millennia, it occasionally puffs out steam from small vents, or fumaroles, near its summit, suggesting that it is still technically active, according to the European Space Agency . However, geologists have not properly assessed its eruptive potential.

Indonesia's 'Twin Peaks' volcanoes

A 2021 astronaut photo shows the surprising similarities between Mount Sundoro and Mount Sumbing, which lie at the heart of Java, Indonesia.

Volcanic 'googly eyes' stare into space

A 2014 astronaut photo shows a pair of volcanic lakes appearing to stare up into space from the Chiltepe Peninsula of Nicaragua's Lake Managua. These "eyes" and "skull" were created by violent eruptions thousands of years ago.

Pair of 'glowing' lava lakes in Africa

This false-color satellite photo from 2014 shows the immense heat emanating from lava lakes at the summits of a pair of simultaneously erupting volcanoes in Congo.

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WASHINGTON — The Trump administration’s grand bargain with drugmakers on GLP-1s was based on a simple premise: lower prices in exchange for higher sales volume. Instead, the companies secured higher volume without the lower prices in some cases.

When President Trump’s team of negotiators got Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk to agree to a monthly $245 price in Medicare and Medicaid in November, that price was supposed to be for all GLP-1s, including those for obesity, which until then had not been covered by Medicare.

But that price was contingent on private Medicare insurers agreeing to cover the drugs for all uses, with a $50 copay. The administration did not publicly mention that condition, but Novo and Lilly recently confirmed it to STAT.

Continue to STAT+ to read the full story…