new video loaded: Trump Explores ‘Many Options’ for Dealing With Iran
transcript
transcript
Trump Explores ‘Many Options’ for Dealing With Iran
President Trump is considering several options, including diplomacy and military force, for dealing with Iran, which has been rocked by violent protests.
Diplomacy is always the first option for the president. With that said, the president has shown he’s unafraid to use military options if and when he deems necessary, and nobody knows that better than Iran.
President Trump is considering several options, including diplomacy and military force, for dealing with Iran, which has been rocked by violent protests.
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A US district judge ruled that Trump’s decision singled out states that voted for Democrats in the 2024 elections.
Published On 13 Jan 202613 Jan 2026
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A United States judge has ruled that the administration of President Donald Trump acted illegally when it cancelled the payment of $7.6bn in clean energy grants to states that voted for Democrat Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.
In a decision on Monday, US District Judge Amit Mehta said the administration’s actions violated the Constitution’s equal protection requirements.
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“Defendants freely admit that they made grant-termination decisions primarily – if not exclusively – based on whether the awardee resided in a state whose citizens voted for President Trump in 2024,” Mehta wrote in a summary of the case.
The grants were intended to support hundreds of clean energy projects across 16 states, including California, Colorado, New Jersey and Washington state. The projects included initiatives to create battery plants and hydrogen technology.
But projects in those states were cancelled in October, as the Trump administration sought to ratchet up pressure on Democratic-led states during a heated government shutdown.
At the time, Trump told the network One America News (OAN) that he would take aim at projects closely associated with the Democratic Party.
“We could cut projects that they wanted, favourite projects, and they’d be permanently cut,” he told the network.
Russell Vought, the Trump-appointed director for the Office of Management and Budget, posted on social media that month that “funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda” had been “cancelled”.
The cuts included up to $1.2bn for a hub in California aimed at accelerating hydrogen technology, and up to $1bn for a hydrogen project in the Pacific Northwest.
St Paul, Minnesota, was among the jurisdictions affected by the grant cuts. The city and a coalition of environmental groups filed a lawsuit to contest the Trump administration’s decision.
Second legal setback
A spokesperson for the US Department of Energy, however, said the Trump administration disagrees with the judge’s ruling.
Officials “stand by our review process, which evaluated these awards individually and determined they did not meet the standards necessary to justify the continued spending of taxpayer dollars”, spokesman Ben Dietderich said.
The Trump administration has repeatedly pledged to cut back on what it considers wasteful government spending.
Monday’s ruling was the second legal setback in just a matter of hours for Trump’s efforts to roll back the clean energy programmes in the US.
A separate federal judge ruled on Monday that work on a major offshore wind farm for Rhode Island and Connecticut can resume, handing the industry at least a temporary victory as Trump seeks to shut it down.
The US president campaigned for the White House on a promise to end the offshore wind industry, saying electric wind turbines – sometimes called windmills – are too expensive and hurt whales and birds.
Instead, Trump has pushed for the US to ramp up fossil fuel production, considered the primary contributor to climate change. The US president has repeatedly defied scientific consensus on climate change and referred to it as a “hoax”.
Randa Abdel-Fattah says a decision to exclude her from the Adelaide Festival was racist
One of Australia’s biggest cultural festivals has been left in disarray after a decision to disinvite a prominent Australian-Palestinian writer, triggering a massive backlash and mass exodus from fellow authors.
The board of the Adelaide Festival last week said Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah, a vocal critic of Israel, had been removed from its Writers’ Week lineup due to “sensitivities” after the shooting of 15 people – by gunmen allegedly inspired by the Islamic State militant group – at a Jewish festival at Bondi Beach in December.
Though the Adelaide Festival’s board said they “do not suggest in any way” that Abdel-Fattah had “any connection with the tragedy at Bondi”, they made the decision that it would not be “culturally sensitive” to include her “given her past statements”.
She called the decision to exclude her a “blatant and shameless act of anti-Palestinian racism and censorship” and the attempt to link her with the Bondi attack “despicable”.
In the following days, dozens of other writers scheduled to appear withdrew from the festival. By Tuesday the list had jumped to 180, including former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, British author Zadie Smith, beloved Australian writer Helen Garner and British-Australian novelist Kathy Lette.
Over the weekend, four members of the eight-member board, including the chair, resigned without detailing their reasons. And on Tuesday the director of the Writers’ Week – who had invited Abdel-Fattah – stood down too.
Louise Adler, the Jewish daughter of Holocaust survivors, said art had increasingly come under attack since the start of the Israel-Gaza war and that she could not “be party to silencing writers”.
ABC
Louise Adler said she would not be ‘party to silencing writers’
“Writers and writing matters, even when they are presenting ideas that discomfort and challenge us,” she wrote in the Guardian Australia.
Hours later, the board put out a fresh statement, apologising to Abdel-Fattah for “how the decision was represented” and announcing that the Writers’ Week could “no longer go ahead”.
“We recognise and deeply regret the distress this decision has caused,” it wrote.
All remaining members of the Adelaide Festival board would step down bar one, it said, a move it hoped could “secure the success” of the festival this year “and beyond”.
The saga has now left the festival board-less just weeks out from its start late next month, has threatened to spark legal action, and has reignited discussions in Australia about freedom of expression.
Why has Randa Abdel-Fattah been criticised?
Abdel-Fattah, a novelist, lawyer and academic, had been invited to the festival to discuss her latest novel Discipline – which she describes as “a cautionary tale about the cost of silence and cowardice”.
She has previously been criticised for statements arguing that Zionists had “no claim or right to cultural safety” and a 2024 post on X in which she said “the goal is decolonisation and the end of this murderous Zionist colony”, a reference to Israel.
Controversies around her also include an image posted to her social media in the hours after the 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel, depicting a person parachuting with a Palestinian flag. Hamas fighters used paragliders to cross the high-tech security fence into Israel at the start of the attack, landing in civilian areas where many residents died.
About 1,200 people were killed in the attack. It triggered a massive Israeli military offensive on Gaza, which has killed more than 71,419 people since then, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.
Abdel-Fattah confirmed to Australian broadcaster ABC that she had posted the image, but said she had done so before the true extent of the attacks was known.
“At that point, I had no idea about the death toll, I had no idea about what was happening on the ground… Of course, I do not support the killing of civilians,” she told the ABC.
The academic has been the target of public campaigns before. Opposition politicians and some prominent Jewish Australians called for research funding awarded to Abdel-Fattah to be cancelled in 2024. After a letter from Education Minister Jason Clare, the funding was suspended while Abdel-Fattah was investigated over allegations she had bent the grant’s rules, though she was ultimately cleared last month.
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South Australia’s premier Peter Malinauskas has backed the decision
Norman Schueler, of the Jewish Community Council for South Australia, last week said his organisation had sent a letter to the Adelaide Festival board lobbying for Abdel-Fattah’s removal.
“It was a very wise move and it will improve the cohesiveness of the festival by not having her there,” he told the Adelaide Advertiser after her removal. Upon news of the growing walkout, he added: “I think for everyone who has dropped out that it’s rather pathetic because that means they agree with what Dr Fattah is on about… Namely, that Israel should not exist.”
South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskus – whose government is a key backer of the festival – said that he “wholeheartedly” supported Abdel-Fattah’s exclusion and had “absolutely made clear to the board that I did not think it was wise” to invite her.
However, Malinauskus denied having played any role in the board’s decision, telling the ABC on Monday that, though he shared his opinion, he had not threatened to withdraw funding or sack anyone. He also denied that his position was influenced by Jewish lobby groups.
Adler said the board’s decision had been taken “despite my strongest opposition” and added: “In my view, boards composed of individuals with little experience in the arts, and blind to the moral implications of abandoning the principle of freedom of expression, have been unnerved by the pressure exerted by politicians calculating their electoral prospects and relentless, coordinated letter-writing campaigns.”
“The board’s statement cites community cohesion, an oft-referenced anxiety which should be treated with scepticism,” she said. “One doesn’t have to be a student of history to know that art in the service of ‘social cohesion’ is propaganda.”
After her appearance was cancelled, Abdel-Fattah said Australian arts and cultural institutions had displayed “utter contempt and inhumanity towards Palestinians”.
“The only Palestinians they will tolerate are silent and invisible ones.”
It isn’t the first time Abdel-Fattah has been at the centre of the derailment of a writers’ festival.
Two days before it was due to begin in August last year, Bendigo Writers Festival issued a code of conduct requiring speakers to “avoid language or topics that could be considered inflammatory, divisive, or disrespectful”.
A subsequent walkout – led by Abdel-Fattah and others over concerns it could prevent free discussion of the Israel-Gaza war – led to the cancellation of around a third of the programme.
Allegations of hypocrisy
However Abdel-Fattah has been accused of double standards, by sections of the media and Malinauskus, who claim that she had successfully demanded the exclusion of New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman from the Adelaide festival two years ago.
A letter sent by her and nine other academics to the board followed his publication of a column in which he compared players in the Middle East to members of the animal kingdom, including caterpillars, wasps and spiders.
“Call it what you like, after the correspondence from Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah, they removed a pro-Jewish Israeli speaker. Fast forward two years and I think it’s reasonable for the board to apply the same principle,” Malinauskus said.
Abdel-Fattah rejected the allegations of hypocrisy, saying in a statement to the BBC that Friedman’s article had “compared various Arab and Muslim nations and groups to insects and vermin requiring eradication at a time when talk of ‘human animals’ was being used to justify wholesale slaughter in Gaza”.
“In contrast, I was cancelled because my presence and identity as a Palestinian was deemed ‘culturally insensitive’ and linked to the Bondi atrocity,” her statement continued.
She also denied that Friedman had been removed at her behest. In a letter dated February 2024 and quoted by Australian media, the board wrote that cancelling a writer was an “extremely serious request” and that while Friedman had been scheduled to attend he would no longer take part due to “last-minute scheduling issues”.
“If he was in fact quietly cancelled, it only underscores the racism of cancelling me in such a brazen and publicly humiliating manner,” Abdel-Fattah said.
The BBC has contacted Friedman for comment.
What have other writers said?
Getty Images
Jacinda Ardern did not make a statement but confirmed her withdrawal on Monday
Adler said at least 180 writers had withdrawn from the festival, devastating its programme. Some said that while they did not necessarily agree with Abdel-Fattah, they defended her right to free speech.
Australian journalist Peter Greste, who was jailed in Egypt a decade ago in what human rights groups called a sham case, in an opinion piece for the Guardian Australia wrote that her exclusion meant “we are undermining our capacity to hold those difficult conversations” and “doing the work” of extremists for them.
Kathy Lette in an Instagram post argued that audiences should be trusted to “make up their minds about all speakers – me included. As authoritarianism rears its hideous head around the world, we need to defend these havens of free speech.”
However, former Australian foreign minister Bob Carr, who has strongly criticised Israel’s assault on Gaza, said he supported Abdel-Fattah’s exclusion. He told the Guardian Australia he believed some of her previous statements had been counterproductive to the Palestinian cause and that given the circumstances after the Bondi attack the decision was not unreasonable.
“The Adelaide writers’ festival has supported hearing Palestinian voices, its record on this is unimpeachable,” Carr said.
He was one of the only festival speakers to publicly back the board.
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Former Foreign Minister Bob Carr has been a regular critic of Israel
Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis posted a video on X in which he tore up his “precious” and “coveted” invitation to speak, claiming the festival had been “destroyed” by the “Zionist lobby”.
Award-winning First Nations poet Dr Evelyn Araluen said she was “so disappointed to witness yet another absurd and irrational capitulation to the demands of a genocidal foreign state from the Australian arts sector”.
“Erasing Palestinians from public life in Australia won’t prevent antisemitism,” she added.
ABC journalist and presenter Sarah Ferguson, who had been due to host conversations with Tina Brown and Jacinda Ardern – both now cancelled – said the festival had “created a place where debate flourished… including on our most difficult subjects” and that it “should be defended in our cultural life”.
What happens next?
Abdel-Fattah’s lawyer, Michael Bradley, has sent a letter to the board demanding to know which of her past statements were used to justify last week’s decision.
“The moral indefensibility of the Adelaide Festival board’s actions has been amply evidenced by the reaction it’s provoked. It also trampled on Randa’s human rights, and the board will have to answer for that,” Bradley told the BBC on Monday, adding that Abdel-Fattah had yet to decide whether to take any legal action.
In its latest statement, the board said: “This is not about identity or dissent but rather a continuing rapid shift in the national discourse around the breadth of freedom of expression in our nation following Australia’s worst terror attack in history.”
The focus would now turn to re-assembling the board, the statement said, and “ensuring a successful Adelaide Festival… which safeguards the long and rich cultural legacy of our state.”
It added that it is “committed to rebuilding trust with our artistic community and audience to enable open and respectful discussions at future Adelaide Writers’ Week events”.
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Jeffrey Sonnenfeld is Lester Crown Professor of Leadership Practice at the Yale School of Management and founder of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute. A leadership and governance scholar, he created the world’s first school for incumbent CEOs and he has advised five U.S. presidents across political parties. His latest book, Trump’s Ten Commandments, will be published by Simon & Schuster in March 2026. <Stephen Henriques is a senior research fellow of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute. He was a consultant at McKinsey & Company and a policy analyst for the governor of Connecticut.
These are the key developments from day 1,419 of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Published On 13 Jan 202613 Jan 2026
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Here is where things stand on Tuesday, January 13:
Fighting
At least two people have been killed and three others injured as Russia launched attacks on Ukraine’s northeastern city of Kharkiv, according to Regional Governor Oleh Syniehubov.
Russia also initiated a separate missile attack on the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, and air defence units have been deployed to repel it, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said on Telegram. Tymur Tkachenko, the head of Kyiv’s military administration, warned residents to take cover. There were no immediate reports on casualties or damage to properties and infrastructure in the attack.
Russian drones struck two foreign-flagged vessels, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Oleksii Kuleba said, the second such attack in four days on Black Sea shipping. Kuleba said the vessels were sailing under the flags of Panama and San Marino, and that one person was injured.
Russia attacked energy infrastructure in Ukraine’s southern Odesa region, causing blackouts that affected at least 33,500 families, Ukraine’s largest private energy firm DTEK said, describing the damage as “significant”.
Kuleba said on Telegram that 90 percent of Kyiv’s apartment buildings have had their heating restored, leaving fewer than 500 dwellings still to be connected. But Mayor Klitschko put the number with no heating at 800, with most living on the west bank of the Dnipro River.
Last year was the deadliest for civilians in Ukraine since 2022, a record driven by intensified hostilities along the front line and the expanded use of long-range weapons, the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine said. Conflict-related violence in Ukraine killed 2,514 civilians and injured 12,142 in 2025, a 31 percent rise in the number of victims from 2024, the monitor said in its monthly update.
Russia’s Ministry of Defence said the target it hit last week with a hypersonic Oreshnik ballistic missile was a Ukrainian aircraft repair plant in Lviv. The Lviv State Aviation Repair Plant is located near the Polish border. Russia described the target as disabled.
At an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council, the United States decried Russia’s use of the nuclear-capable Oreshnik missile, calling it an “inexplicable escalation”.
Russia’s Defence Ministry said its forces had captured the village of Novoboykivske in the Zaporizhia region of Ukraine.
Politics and diplomacy
In his regular nightly address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that the world has to help Iranian protesters free themselves from the oppressive government that “has brought so much evil to Ukraine and to other countries”. Iran’s government is a close ally of Russia.
German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said he and his US counterpart Marco Rubio had agreed on the importance of a transatlantic alliance to secure a lasting peace in Ukraine.
Wadephul added that Germany and the US were committed to Article 5 of the NATO treaty, which commits member states to rise to each other’s defence, should one state come under attack.
The German foreign minister added that, at a time of “uncertainty and crises”, unity within NATO “is a clear signal to Russia that it should not try to threaten” the alliance.
Swedish Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard has called for greater pressure on Moscow. She suggested the European Union should ban companies from providing any support to Moscow’s oil and gas shipping fleet, introduce sanctions against Russian fertilisers and stop the export of luxury goods to Russia.
Norway has announced that it is providing 340 million euros ($397m) in emergency funding to support Ukraine’s energy sector and help the government maintain critical services, as part of its aid in 2026.
Finnish police said they lifted the seizure of a Russia-linked ship, which had been held on suspicion of sabotaging an undersea telecommunications cable running across the Gulf of Finland, from Helsinki to Estonia.
The investigation into the Russia-linked ship will nevertheless continue. Some of the ship’s crew remain under a travel ban, according to the head of the investigation at Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation, Risto Lohi.
Economy
A US-linked investor group won the rights to develop Ukraine’s Dobra lithium deposit in the central Kirovohrad region, Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko announced on Telegram. The deal is seen as a test case for drawing Western capital into a front-line economy, while trying to deepen ties with Washington.
Deep in genteel Wimbledon, a tech revolution is stirring.
The home of The All England Lawn Tennis Club and The Wombles doesn’t usually find itself at the bleeding edge of music industry technology but, in Absolute Label Services’ suburban HQ, that’s all about to change.
True, at first it might seem like business as usual. The team are busily going about their Q4 business – prime time for Absolute’s eclectic roster of artist and label services clients, which famously ranges from Jane McDonald to drill.
And the bosses, co-managing directors Henry Semmence and Simon Wills, are bantering away in a manner befitting their billing as the Ant & Dec of the music business.
Today, however, it’s not the services business – the sector in which they have forged such a solid gold reputation that not even an ill-fated dalliance with the crumbling Utopia empire (which bought Absolute in early 2022, only to sell it back to Semmence and Wills in 2023 amidst its collapse) could dent it – that is on their minds.
Instead, they are here to talk about Anthology – not a catalogue repackage from one of their legacy artist clients, but an AI-enhanced ‘music operating system’ that promises to give users full control over everything they do, in one place.
It even comes with an AI executive, Ant, trained on Absolute’s wealth of in-house industry knowledge, to offer 24/7 support.
“Streams, physical sales, social figures, neighbouring rights, P&L, campaign material, live dates…” says Wills. “You can see, with one single point of clarity, how every part of your business is performing, interacting and impacting. It is literally every data and operational control point for a music rights company in one place. And if we’ve missed one, tell us – we’ll add it!”
Wills speaks about the technology – which has taken five years and over £2 million to develop – with almost evangelical zeal. Semmence, in contrast, jokes about being “a bit of a Luddite” but clearly is just as much a believer in the impact Anthology will have on his – and, soon, other people’s – business.
Although it was only offically announced this year, Absolute has been using Anthology since July 2024, with Wills saying its impact on the day-to-day business has been “massive”.
“It is every data point in one place. And if we’ve missed one, tell us – we’ll add it!”
“I’m not exaggerating – it has changed the way in which we operate,” he says. “We have taken away a lot of the drag, boring, dry stuff that has to be done to make sure things operate. It’s turned processes that take days into minutes. We haven’t shrunk in terms of staff, but we’re putting those roles to better use, so that they can do more creative, cool stuff.”
Semmence and Wills with Mark Dowling, Debs Cutting
And now, Absolute is putting its money where its mouth is: from Q1, they will be opening up Anthology to outside independent label clients (or ‘tenants’ as they prefer).
Their plans are to take on a modest number initially but, once it’s up and running, they see it as an almost infinitely scalable business.
“We know we’ve got a pretty powerful thing,” says Wills. “At the moment, it feels like we’ve got a Ferrari in the garage and all we’re doing is opening the garage door and going, ‘That’s pretty good, isn’t it?’ What we actually need to do is get it out and drive it and, once we’re there, the sky’s the limit.”
So, what better time for Semmence and Wills to grab some leftover Halloween snacks from the Absolute kitchen and head to the boardroom to give us their thoughts on AI, Universal’s proposed Downtown acquisition and what they learned from the Utopia debacle…
So, why does the music business need Anthology?
SW:The music ecosystem has gotten increasingly complex, and businesses are managing an ever-expanding number of data points, rights and revenue streams. But they’re still using fragmented infrastructure that is stuck in 2010.
With every new shift in the industry comes another tool that caters to that specific part of the ecosystem. But, as a result, companies have ended up with workflows based on a patchwork of different platforms, portals and programmes; all siloed, all owned by someone else and all held together by duct tape.
The Anthology portal
These platforms don’t work well together and they don’t give the whole picture. It drags on absolutely every part of what you do.
If you’re a label boss, it’s incredibly difficult to get a complete, high-definition picture of your operation at any given time. When you can’t see the whole picture, you don’t truly understand what’s going on in your business.
And then you aren’t serving the artist or the music as well as you could be. You miss trends, you miss opportunities, you miss problems and so you miss revenue. Anthology is a response to all that.
It was clearly a big commitment in terms of time, resources and money to develop this. How have you managed that without any outside investment?
SW:Through all of the efforts we’ve put into label services, getting that right and being able to operate commercially in a sensible way, that meant we were never spending more than we could afford to spend, being tight at the back and putting money away for a rainy day. Because we’ve run our business without unicorns and fairies, we could actually afford to do it.
HS:We’re investing in ourselves. We have total belief in what we’re trying to achieve and, as a result, didn’t feel the need at this point to go out and get somebody else on board.
We believe what we’ve got is right, scalable and can be used for us and the industry going forward – we believed in it, so we’ve invested a fair chunk of Absolute’s success over the last few years back into the business, as opposed to us stripping it all out.
So, is there a lot riding on this in terms of the future of Absolute?
HS:It’s a totally huge move. It’s lots of investment, both financial and resource-wise. We believe it’s the way forward and how we can make our company grow – and grow properly.
But we’re not leaving anything behind in terms of Absolute Label Services, both will run in tandem, they complement each other.
Some people in the music industry are against any use of AI. What’s your message to those people?
HS:Obviously AI is my specialist subject [laughs], but the industry is just talking in scare terms the whole time.
I understand that totally about copyright protection and the protection of creatives, but there’s a huge positive side. So, we’ve got to embrace that and use it to our advantage to help us get to the point where we can protect creatives and owning copyrights.
SW:It’s an easier sell for us, because we’ll never bring into play AI as a music creative. We’re never going to develop a system like Udio or Suno, that will produce a track that might sound like something else. We’re not going down that road whatsoever.
The road we’re going down is, how can we help an artist or rights-holder in getting their voice heard in what is already a vacuum? As we know, 50,000 tracks are going up to Deezer a day from AI models, and we need a way to cut through that noise.
Every music industry company has its own portal nowadays. How is Anthology different?
SW: That’s like comparing the internet now to an Encarta CD in the ‘90s!
Portals did a job in the mid-2010s, when the levels of royalty and revenue data started to rise. They gave a certain level of visibility across a certain amount of data.
The industry has moved on by several orders of magnitude, but unfortunately many businesses are still relying on those antiquated portals. The world has changed and so should our infrastructure.
“The industry has moved on, but many businesses are relying on antiquated portals.”
For example, with Anthology we can see exactly which track is reacting on TikTok and causing a spike in streams in a certain territory, and we can generate social media copy and asset suggestions to double down on the popularity – all without leaving Anthology.
We can then generate a pitch for the track targeting specific playlists, and we might get an alert to say that the relevant vinyl stock is low, which we can replenish because sales are likely to lift there as well – again, all without leaving Anthology.
With the old way of doing things, you might not even know you had that opportunity until the heads of each department sat down for the monthly meeting to compare notes.
Are you worried that people will copy the system once they have access to it?
SW: I guess they could, but why would you copy it? If you’re a rights-holder, it’s not cost effective to copy it.
The investment we’ve put into it is in the millions. I know exactly what went into it, so to think that someone else can come along and go, ‘I should be able to knock that up in six months’… Well, I’d like to see it!
You’ve said Anthology can help indie labels challenge the majors in this era of consolidation – that’s a pretty bold claim, isn’t it?
SW:I would go as far as to say that it’s superior to anything that the majors will have.
I’m genuinely not a cocky person, but we’ve worked with people who operate within major systems and we know that they are all over the place, and there are multiple things you have to cobble together in order to get a full picture – and sometimes those systems don’t even do that.
This is very different: it’s about reshaping how we view systems, which I know is a very dry thing, but it’s so bloody important, especially when the independent community needs that access.
HS: Knowledge is power and this is giving independents knowledge, and therefore power – it’s as simple as that.
Would you let the major labels use it?
SW: No! That’s not the ambition right now at all. [Laughs] This is a tool for the power of good – no, I’m joking!
As an independent business, are you worried about the proposed Universal acquisition of Downtown, which includes FUGA?
SW: That obviously makes rights-holders nervous and I understand why. But I’ve always had the mentality, having sat on many AIM board meetings, that you can put your hand up and say, ‘This isn’t fair’, but that’s no use to anybody. What you actually have to do is, produce something better.
HS:The whole independent industry could get more clients, because people won’t want to be associated with a major. It’s a huge opportunity.
SW:One of my bugbears is, you can’t just turn around to someone and say, ‘Don’t use that because it’s going through a major record company’.
The case has to be, ‘Don’t use that because there’s something better’. You can’t make commercial decisions like that, you have to go on the basis of which one’s going to do the better job. We’ve just got to do better and then they will come to us for a reason.
With the Downtown deal, the regulatory concerns seem to be over=restricting market access for the indies, and about Universal potentially having access to independents’ data. Which are you more worried about?
SW:Well, you can access [the market] through other points so, for me, it would be about that data. If we believe that [Universal] don’t care about that data, that’s a quite naïve point of view.
So, should Anthology clients worry about who will see their data?
SW:No. When we developed Anthology, one of the things we set out to do within the system is to give data sovereignty – every one of our tenants has its own container.
There is no cross-pollination with another tenant’s data. We made sure that was the case when we set out, because we knew that was going to be one of the questions.
How important is Anthology in helping Absolute bounce back after the Utopia experience?
SW: We went into that already planning this. It was an interference at the time, but we made sure that there was no focus lost on what we were trying to achieve. It didn’t matter if it was inside or outside of that environment – and thankfully it’s outside!
There are a lot of things we could say about it, but we went into that whole Utopia set-up, arguably naively, but on the basis that it was going to take what we were doing as a business, turbocharge it and turn it into something greater.
So, nothing changed from an ambition point of view and nothing confused us along the way, incredibly, because of the way that we operated within that structure. We didn’t merge any businesses, resources or staff, we kept that completely separate and independent. That meant that, coming out the other side, there was no change except for who owned the shares.
HS: We got some normality back, basically.
SW:There was an incredible amount to learn and we’ve come out better for it – scarred, but better for it!
It could have dragged the whole business down though, couldn’t it?
HS:It could have done. But we were clever enough, lucky enough and organised enough on the way in to make sure it was fully protected.
Because we’ve been doing it for such a long time, and I think we do still have a good reputation in the industry, we were able to come out the other side, still intact.
It took a bit of time to get ourselves back on our feet properly but I’m very proud of all the people here that did that, all the staff stayed with us and kept going. Bumpy roads are all part of the journey.
What happens if Anthology is a huge success and someone makes you an offer for the business?
SW:[Laughs] Well, how much?
How much do you want?
SW:We’ve done this ourselves. We’re privately owned and, when we come to rolling out our five-year plan, it may be that we take investment that will help us get to another stage.
I would never cut that off, but if the question is as pointed as, ‘Are you selling to a major record company?’, the answer is no.
“If the question is, ‘Are you selling to a major record company?’, the answer is no.”
HS:Having been through that beast, we are far more educated as to how we would accept any further investment in the business, or help in developing the business.
SW:I don’t want to sound like a megalomaniac, but when you’ve got an ambition to do something, you want to achieve it, just to know you can do it.
That’s more powerful than anything else so, even if a major record company comes along and offers you millions and millions of pounds it’s like, where do you go then? There’s more to life than that.
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Clovis Swim Club’s Hailey Marinovich has committed to Pennsylvania State University for the fall of 2026.
I am incredibly overjoyed to announce my commitment to continue pursuing my academic and athletic career at Penn State University!! A big thank you to my family, coaches, and friends who have showed continuous support towards me throughout these past years. Also, a special thank you to the coaches at Penn State who have given me this amazing opportunity for my future! Go Nittany Lions!!💙🤍 #WeAre
Marinovich competed in three events at the Speedo Winter Junior Championships in Austin in December. Her top finish came in the 400 IM, where she swam a lifetime best time in 4:24.33. Marinovich also clocked a lifetime best in the 200 backstroke, where she finished 49th in 2:00.95. In addition to those two swims, she finished 90th in 200 IM, stopping the clock in 2:05.31.
Marinovich hails from Fresno, Calif, and represents Clovis West High School. As a junior, Marinovich placed 20th overall in the 200 IM (2:04.92) at the CIF State Championship. A week earlier, she set two of her fastest swims of all time at the Central Section D1 Championships; she clocked her fastest 100 back in 57.04, and her quickest 200 IM in 2:03.18.
In addition to her backstroke and IM skills, Marinovich also holds notable best times in the 100 free from the Speedo Sectionals in Justin in March of 53.33. She set a 200 free best in February in 1:55.35 at the CCS SCY Age Group Championships.
Best Times SCY:
200 IM: 2:03.18
400 IM: 4:24.33
100 Back: 57.04
200 Back: 2:00.95
100 Free: 53.33
200 Free: 1:55.35
The Penn State women finished 12th at the Big Ten Swimming and Diving Championships last season.
Based on her best times, Marinovich would have finished 35th in the 200 back, 40th in the 400 IM, and 52nd in the 200 IM.
There is still a bit of room for Marinovich to make up before she reaches that scoring range for the Nittany Lions.
Penn State begins to address a definite need with Marinovich; in the Big Ten’s last season, Penn State did not score a single point in the 200 back or 400 IM, and only scored 15 points in the 200 IM.
Since December of 2024, Marinovich has dropped six seconds on her 400 IM. Her 200 back has also seen significant improvement, shaving three seconds over two years. If she can replicate that success and improve on those times prior to her debut in Happy Valley, she could continue to build a very promising foundation for a productive collegiate career.
Marinovich joins Sara McNabb, Gabi Abruzzo, Kate Fedor, and Hanna Wilson in the 2026 recruiting class for Penn State.
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For millions of people, losing their sense of smell quietly reshapes daily life. Meals lose nuance, familiar places feel strangely distant, and critical warning signals like smoke, gas or spoiled food become harder to register. Smell’s deep links to memory and emotion make its absence especially disorienting, and once damaged, the system is notoriously difficult to restore. That challenge has led some researchers to stop asking how to fix smell, and start asking whether its information might reach the brain another way.
Smell loss, or anosmia, affects tens of millions of people worldwide, often following viral infections, head trauma, or neurological disease. Unlike vision or hearing, olfaction depends on fragile neural pathways that connect directly to brain regions involved in emotion and memory. When those pathways are disrupted, the result is not just sensory loss, but a profound change in how people experience the world.
In a study published in Science Advances, researchers explored an alternative strategy that sidesteps the damaged olfactory system entirely. Instead of trying to restore smell itself, they focused on preserving what smell provides: information about the chemical environment around us. In other words, they asked whether perception could be rebuilt by disentangling how odors are detected from how they are experienced.
Their prototype device does exactly that. It separates detection from perception, first capturing odors in the air with an artificial sensing system and translating them into a digital signature. That information is then delivered to the brain through a different sensory channel, one that remains functional even when smell is lost. Rather than activating the olfactory nerve, the system stimulates the trigeminal nerve, a sensory pathway in the nasal cavity responsible for conveying touch, temperature, and irritation.
The stimulation produces a distinct physical sensation inside the nose. Users are not smelling in the traditional sense. Instead, with training, the brain learns to associate specific stimulation patterns with particular odors, allowing people to tell smells apart through sensation rather than scent. In effect, the brain builds a new interpretive map, using touch to stand in for chemical perception.
This approach draws on a concept known as sensory substitution, in which information from a missing or impaired sense is rerouted through a functioning one. The nasal cavity is uniquely suited for this strategy because it houses both systems side by side: the olfactory network for smell and the trigeminal system for somatosensory signals. By leveraging that second pathway, the device offers a way to transmit odor information without relying on the damaged circuitry of smell.
To test the idea, the researchers ran a series of experiments involving 65 participants, including people with normal olfaction and others with partial or complete smell loss. Participants were able to detect odorant molecules using the device, and most could reliably distinguish between different odors. Crucially, the system performed just as well for individuals who could not smell as it did for those who could, suggesting that the trigeminal pathway provides a stable and broadly accessible route for transmitting these signals.
The device does not restore the sensory richness or emotional immediacy of smell, and the researchers are careful not to frame it as a replacement. At this stage, it remains a proof of concept. But it demonstrates something new: that the brain can learn to access chemical information through touch when smell itself is no longer available.
More broadly, the work reflects a shift in how sensory loss might be addressed. Rather than focusing solely on repairing damaged systems, it suggests that perception itself can be rebuilt by translating information across senses.
For people living with anosmia, that reframing offers a quieter form of possibility, not the return of smell, but a new way to engage with the chemical world through learning, adaptation, and experience.
