More than 300 prisoners of war are finally heading home on Thursday after Ukraine and Russia reached a deal for a swap. Tearfully, several freed prisoners immediately spoke to their families over the phone.
Published On 5 Feb 2026
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‘Sorry for being away’: Ukraine, Russia swap prisoners of war | Russia-Ukraine war
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Mandelson saga will bring PM down unless he takes ‘necessary action’, Harman warns | Politics News
Sir Keir Starmer risks being toppled by the fiasco around Lord Mandelson “unless he takes action”, Baroness Harman has warned.
The former deputy Labour leader said the prime minister “seems to have drifted so far away from [his] values in appointing Peter Mandelson” to be US ambassador, and that he must return to them to survive.
It follows growing anger within the Labour Party at the PM’s initial decision to oppose releasing documents about the vetting and appointment of Lord Mandelson, which led to a public climbdown last night in the Commons.
Speaking to the Electoral Dysfunction podcast, Harriet Harman also warned the increasing angst around the PM’s handling of Lord Mandelson is “so serious” and has called for Sir Keir’s chief-of-staff, Morgan McSweeney, to go if he was behind the appointment.
Baroness Harman told Sky News’ political editor Beth Rigby: “I think it is so serious for Keir Starmer. I don’t think it’s inevitable that it will bring him down.
“But it will bring him down – unless he takes the action, which is really necessary for him to take, and that’s this: firstly, he’s got to stop blaming Mandelson and saying, ‘he lied to me’. Because actually he should never have been considering him in the first place.
“To say ‘he lied to me’ makes it look weak and naive and gullible. So it’s just completely the wrong thing.
“He should be reflecting on why he made that appointment, not angry at the evilness of Peter Mandelson.
“He should also be thinking about a real reset in Number 10, because what you need from your team in Number 10 is people who share your values and your principles and who will help you be the best prime minister you can be, according to your true self.
“Clearly, that is not what happened because the Keir Starmer, who was DPP [director of public prosecutions], would never have appointed somebody like Peter Mandelson to represent the country.”
The Labour peer also insisted that Sir Keir must “go back to the manifesto and do all the things that were promised in cleaning up politics and… bring them forward”.
This includes bringing forward the government’s action on tackling violence against women and girls, Baroness Harman said.
“If he does that, he can win the confidence of Labour backbenchers, the confidence in parliament and the confidence for the country,” she said. “But I think that if he doesn’t do that, there’s no way this is going to be glossed over.”
She added that she wants both the government and Sir Keir to succeed, and pointed out how she knew him well when he was the DPP.
Baroness Harman said: “If you’d asked me what he stood for, I would have said standing up for human rights, standing up to, for victims, standing up for women and girls. Standing up for decency and honesty.
“And yet he seems to have drifted so far away from those values in appointing Peter Mandelson to be the UK’s representative in the US.
“Peter Mandelson was called the Prince of Darkness. It’s not a secret that he was a bad person. I think that it is very, very serious for Keir Starmer because it goes to the values of the government.”
You can listen to the full episode of Electoral Dysfunction here on Friday morning.
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Cancer cases 40% preventable by avoiding key risk factors, study finds
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Nearly half of cancers could be avoided by cutting out three major risk factors, a new study has revealed.
Research published this week in Nature Medicine identified that nearly 40% of global cancer cases are linked to tobacco (15% of new cases), infections (10%) and alcohol consumption (3%).
Overall, 7.1 million cancer diagnoses in 2022 were linked to 30 modifiable risk factors, according to the study.
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“The key here is that almost half of all cancers could be prevented by behavioral changes,” Dr. Marc Siegel, Fox News Digital senior medical analyst, told Fox News Digital.
Conducted by the World Health Organization and its International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the study analyzed global cancer data across 185 countries, matching it with exposure data for the 30 risk factors.
Nearly half of cancers could be avoided by cutting out three major risk factors, a new study has revealed. (iStock)
Lung, stomach and cervical cancers accounted for nearly half of the cases that were linked to modifiable risks, with many linked to viruses and bacteria like the human papillomavirus (HPV), hepatitis B and C, and Helicobacter pylori (a common bacterium that infects the stomach lining).
“Preventable cancers of the cervix and throat are directly linked to the HPV virus and can be prevented by the HPV vaccine,” added Siegel, who was not involved in the study.
DEADLY CANCER RISK SPIKES WITH CERTAIN LEVEL OF ALCOHOL CONSUMPTION, STUDY FINDS
Lung cancer, throat and GI cancers, and several others were linked to cigarette smoking, and alcohol was associated with breast, liver, colon and throat cancer, the doctor noted.
“Environmental factors are also key, varying by geography — 45% of new cancers could be prevented in men, and 30% in women,” he said.
Lung, stomach and cervical cancers accounted for nearly half of the cases that were linked to modifiable risks. (iStock)
Study author Hanna Fink, from the Cancer Surveillance Branch at IARC/WHO, said the main message is that many cancers can be prevented.
“Almost four in 10 new cancer cases worldwide, which represent 7.1 million lives that don’t need to be changed by a cancer diagnosis, were linked to things we can change or modify through awareness and public-health action,” she told Fox News Digital.
COMMON VITAMIN BYPRODUCT MAY HELP CANCER EVADE IMMUNE SYSTEM, STUDY FINDS
“These things include tobacco smoking, infections, alcohol consumption, excess body weight, air pollution, ultraviolet radiation and others.”
Looking ahead, the researchers recommend that stronger prevention strategies targeting tobacco use, infections, unhealthy body weight and alcohol use could substantially reduce global cancer cases.
“The key here is that almost half of all cancers could be prevented by behavioral changes.”
“The study reinforces that cancer prevention works, and action is most effective at the population level,” Fink said.
“Governments and communities play a crucial role by making healthy choices easier, for example, through higher tobacco and alcohol taxes, smoke-free policies, clear health warnings, safer workplaces, cleaner air, and affordable access to vaccination and screening. Individuals can support these by advocating for healthier environments and using available preventive services.”
Reducing the risk
The AIRC offers the following recommendations to minimize cancer risk.
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- Do not smoke, and if you do smoke, seek help to quit.
- Keep alcohol intake as low as possible, as “there is no safe level of alcohol for cancer risk.”
- Aim for a healthy body weight over time with a balanced diet and regular physical activity.
- Move more and sit less, as even small amounts of daily movement help.
- Take advantage of vaccines, especially the HPV vaccination for young people and the hepatitis B vaccination.
Tobacco was linked to 15% of new cancer cases, making it the largest modifiable risk factor. (iStock)
“As a family physician, I try to help my patients understand how important their daily habits are in lowering their future cancer risk,” said Dr. Chris Scuderi, a cancer survivor and Florida-based family physician.
The doctor’s key prevention targets include daily exercise, consistent and restorative sleep, a Mediterranean-style diet, regular doctor’s visits and sufficient rest.
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“Small daily wins add up to make a powerful difference over time,” added Scuderi, who also was not involved in the research. “It’s also essential to stay on top of your routine screenings, which your family physician can help you with.”
Potential limitations
The study did have some limitations. The researchers often used data from around 2012 due to the long delay between exposure and cancer, which means the data may not reflect the most recent behaviors or environments.
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“This is a necessary simplification, because in reality, latency can be longer or shorter depending on the cancer and the exposure,” Fink noted.
A doctor recommended daily exercise, consistent and restorative sleep, a Mediterranean-style diet, regular doctor’s visits and sufficient rest to help reduce risk. (iStock)
Siegel pointed out that cancer types vary by geographic region — for example, stomach cancer is more prominent in Asia — and the relationships between risk factors and cancer prevalence can differ between countries, populations and time periods.
“We rely on the best available data on how common each risk factor is in different countries and how strongly it is linked to cancer, but these data are not perfect and are weaker in some low- and middle-income countries,” Fink said.
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Finally, the study only looked at 30 risk factors with the strongest evidence and global data.
“Our estimate of ‘almost 40% of cancers are preventable’ is very likely conservative,” the researcher added. “Some other suspected causes, such as certain aspects of diet, could not be included because the science or the data are not yet robust enough at a global level.”
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OpenAI debuts Frontier platform in bid for business bucks • The Register
OpenAI, a maker of frontier models, has announced a platform called Frontier to help enterprises implement software agents. That’s not confusing at all.
The AI biz wants to make it easier for risk-averse organizations to automate workflows with machine learning models, something companies have been loath to do because pilot tests of AI agents often fail to demonstrate meaningful value.
OpenAI’s adoption of the term “frontier” is particularly confusing given that the company started using it to describe AI models in 2023, shortly before it announced the formation of the Frontier Model Forum.
“The Forum defines frontier models as large-scale machine-learning models that exceed the capabilities currently present in the most advanced existing models, and can perform a wide variety of tasks,” the AI biz explained at the time.
Frontier models thus did not exist – being beyond existing models – but were somehow what forum members developed and deployed. The term is essentially code for leading US commercial AI models, as opposed to alternatives.
The company’s Frontier platform is something else entirely. It helps orchestrate AI agents in the way that Kubernetes orchestrates containers.
“Frontier connects siloed data warehouses, CRM systems, ticketing tools, and internal applications to give AI coworkers that same shared business context,” OpenAI explains. “They understand how information flows, where decisions happen, and what outcomes matter. It becomes a semantic layer for the enterprise that all AI coworkers can reference to operate and communicate effectively.”
Context, in the context of AI models, refers to the tokens available to an LLM, meaning the prompt text, the system prompt, and other data including past conversations and interaction history that seed model output. “Business context” then is information from different systems that’s been made available across technical and policy boundaries for AI agents to take action.
OpenAI describes Frontier as enabling “AI coworkers” through an “open agent execution environment.”
“As AI coworkers operate, they build memories, turning past interactions into useful context that improves performance over time,” the company explains, leaning into the conceit that agentic systems can replace employees.
So, Frontier is a (hopefully) safe space to mingle data from sources like Google Calendar, Salesforce, SAP, and business guidance documents so AI agents can complete automated tasks like answering client sales queries.
It sounds simple but clearly isn’t – OpenAI is promising to make Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) available to corporate IT teams to help get agent workflows into production.
Cobus Greyling, chief evangelist at Kore.ai, which also offers an agent platform for enterprises, told The Register in an email that he doubts organizations will find Frontier all that compelling.
“OpenAI Frontier is a name for the frontier of what OpenAI’s tech enables, not a thing you install,” he explained. “It is basically a collective, informal label for using OpenAI’s newest models plus the modern APIs and patterns (Responses API, tool calling, structured outputs, reasoning models, multimodality, agents) together in a loosely coupled, composable way.
“There’s no monolithic ‘Frontier SDK’ or framework; you’re stitching the pieces together yourself, choosing how tightly or loosely agents, tools, memory, and control logic interact.”
Greyling said Frontier is not so much a product as a design philosophy that calls for small, stateless model calls, clear role separation, orchestration in code rather than prompts, and decision-making models rather than a monolithic system making decisions.
What OpenAI is doing, he argues, is similar to what rivals are doing – moving up the AI stack by shifting focus from the models themselves to the applications, tools, orchestration, and standards that define agents.
“This transition commoditizes base models while allowing providers to capture higher value in autonomous agents, enterprise workflows, and interoperability layers,” he said.
And OpenAI has to capture a lot of value to make up for its spending. ®
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Germany’s Merz warns of potential escalation as US, Iran prepare for talks | Nuclear Weapons News
Friedrich Merz said concerns about a further escalation with Iran have dominated his trip to the Gulf region.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has warned of the threat of a military escalation in the Middle East before talks between Iran and the United States in Oman on Friday.
Speaking in Doha on Thursday, Merz said that fears of a new conflict had characterised his talks during his trip to the Gulf region.
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list of 3 itemsend of list“In all my conversations yesterday and today, great concern has been expressed about a further escalation in the conflict with Iran,” he said during a news conference.
Merz also urged Iran to end what he called aggression and enter into talks, saying Germany would do everything it could to de-escalate the situation and work towards regional stability.
The warning came in the run-up to a crucial scheduled meeting between officials from Tehran and Washington in Muscat.
Mediators from Qatar, Turkiye and Egypt have presented Iran and the US with a framework of key principles to be discussed in the talks, including a commitment by Iran to significantly limit its uranium enrichment, two sources familiar with the negotiations have told Al Jazeera.
Before the talks, both sides appear to be struggling to find common ground on a number of issues, including what topics will be up for discussion.
Iran says the talks must be confined to its long-running nuclear dispute with Western powers, rejecting a US demand to also discuss Tehran’s ballistic missiles, and warning that pushing issues beyond the nuclear programme could jeopardise the talks.
Reporting from Washington, DC, Al Jazeera’s Kimberly Halkett said the US is eager for the talks to follow what they see as an agreed-upon format.
“That agreed-upon format includes issues broader than what the US understands Iran is willing to discuss in this initial set of talks,” she explained.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Wednesday that talks would have to include the range of Iran’s ballistic missiles, its support for armed groups around the Middle East and its treatment of its own people, in addition to its nuclear programme.
A White House official has told Al Jazeera that Jared Kushner, US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and a key figure in his Middle East policy negotiations, and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy, have arrived in the Qatari capital, Doha, in advance of the talks.
Halkett said that Qatar is playing an instrumental role in trying to facilitate these talks, along with other regional US partners, including Egypt.
“We understand, according to a White House official, that this is perhaps part of the reason for the visit – to try and work with Qatar in an effort to try and get Iran to expand and build upon the format of these talks.”
Pressure on Iran
The talks come as the region braces for a potential US attack on Iran after US President Donald Trump ordered forces to amass in the Arabian Sea following a violent crackdown by Iran on protesters last month.
Washington has sent thousands of troops to the Middle East, as well as an aircraft carrier, other warships, fighter jets, spy planes and air refuelling tankers.
Trump has warned that “bad things” would probably happen if a deal could not be reached, ratcheting up pressure on Iran.
This is not the first time Iranian and US officials have met in a bid to revive diplomacy between the two nations, which have not had official diplomatic relations since 1980.
In June, US and Iranian officials gathered in the Omani capital to discuss a nuclear agreement, but the process stalled as Israel launched attacks on Iran, killing several military leaders and top nuclear scientists, and targeting nuclear facilities. The US later briefly joined the war, bombing several Iranian nuclear sites.
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‘The market’s in seek and destroy mode’: The new Anthropic AI model scaring lawyers and legal firms | Science, Climate & Tech News
Anthropic, one of the biggest and most influential tech companies in the world, is launching a new model: Claude Opus 4.6.
Until now, this would mostly be big news for techies, where Anthropic is admired as the maker of Claude Code, the code-writing AI tool which many engineers say is taking over their work entirely.
All of a sudden, however, the impact of these tools is being felt more widely, after a seemingly small release from Anthropic shook some sections of the stock market.
Earlier this week, Anthropic released a plug-in to their Claude chatbot, which added new tools for legal analysis.
This relatively minor update sent shares of several large legal data firms tumbling. Thomson Reuters, which owns legal database Westlaw, fell nearly 16%. Analytics company RELX fell 12%.
This may seem strange to outsiders because Anthropic is still relatively unknown outside the world of tech.
A poll by US research firm Blue Rose Research at the end of last year found that it was known by less than 5% of the population.
But analysts say that market participants, impressed by the advances in coding, are starting to wonder if the same gains can be made in other sectors.
“The market’s in seek and destroy mode,” says James Sym, partner at London-based equity firm Goodhart.
“It’s just trying to find the next loser from AI. That’s what you’ve seen in the last couple of days.”
Anthropic’s latest release may add to this sense of urgency, because it is directly aimed at knowledge workers.
As well as a number of improvements to coding – the ability to handle large codebases, for instance, and longer tasks – the new model is designed to deal with the kind of problems non-coders face in apps such as Excel and PowerPoint, where Claude will now be able to work directly.
“Users can build slides from a corporate template, restructure a storyline, convert bullets into diagrams, or generate a full deck from a description – all without leaving the app,” the firm says, although users will have to pay for the privilege.
It adds that this is “our most capable model for all enterprise and knowledge work”.
Anthropic says its new model outperforms its old model on a number of key benchmarks, pointing to an assessment by Norway’s Sovereign Investment, which found that “across 40 cybersecurity investigations, Claude Opus 4.6 produced the best results 38 of 40 times in blind ranking against Claude 4.5 models”.
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But the firm is playing down the impact of its knowledge work tools, directing people to statements made by legal software-makers who build specialist tools using Claude Code.
“There is an important difference between a plugin and operating a collaborative, matter-centric, production-grade platform used by hundreds of the world’s leading legal teams,” says Max Junestrand, CEO at Legora, an AI tool for lawyers.
The market is not seeing things in such a nuanced way, says Sym of Goodhart, who suggests this could be the “canary in the coal mine” for the end of the exuberance around AI.
“If you think about how bubbles in history have evolved over time, they normally follow a bit of a pattern, and what happens is fewer and fewer companies seem to be the winners. That is what’s obviously happened at the moment.
“This may well be just part of that normal pattern where you’re seeing the market decide, actually, it is only going to be a very narrow set of people who win. And of course, the step after that is the whole bubble bursts. And that is what we could be looking at.”
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After saying he wouldn’t seek office, Rick Caruso indicates he’s reconsidering
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Businessman Rick Caruso, who last month announced that he would not seek elected office after an unsuccessful run against Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, indicated this week that he is reconsidering in light of new allegations that Bass pushed for a report on the Palisades Fire to be watered down.
Caruso, who lost the 2022 Los Angeles mayoral contest to Bass, slammed the mayor in a Wednesday post on X.
“Today’s @latimes report is an absolute outrage. Karen Bass actively covered up a report meant to examine the most significant disaster in Los Angeles history. When it comes to life safety matters, this is no longer a matter of making poor judgement, apologizing and moving forward,” Caruso asserted in the post.
PALISADES FIRE DISASTER PUSHES RING TO CLOSE CRITICAL GAPS IN EMERGENCY VISIBILITY
Rick Caruso at The Armani Beauty Luminous Lounge at The Grove on Jan. 15, 2026 in Los Angeles, Calif. (Gilbert Flores/WWD via Getty Images)
“This is a complete loss of public trust and an intentional act of covering up the actions that led to people dying. Everyone should read this article and consider what action is warranted. She has completely failed us,” he added.
In a statement issued last month, Caruso had said that he “decided not to pursue elected office at this time.”
But he indicated to KTTV on Wednesday that he was reconsidering based on the Los Angeles Times report.
Asked if he was reconsidering his decision, Caruso told the outlet that he was “certainly thinking about it.”
Asked if it was the article on Wednesday that made him reconsider, he said, “Yeah, yeah. Because incompetence is one thing. But it’s very different to mix incompetence, and now you’ve got somebody who is actively lying to the people that she has sworn to serve,” Caruso said.
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Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass prior to speaking to media in support of journalist Don Lemon outside federal court on Jan. 30, 2026, in Los Angeles, Calif. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Sources reportedly told the Times that two individuals close to the mayor informed them about Bass’ part in watering down the fire report. The newspaper noted that one source claimed to have spoken with both individuals, while the other source claimed to have spoken with one of the individuals. The Times reported that one person asserted to one of the sources that “the mayor didn’t tell the truth when she said she had nothing to do with changing the report.”
The mayor’s office blasted the Times’ report in a statement to Fox News Digital.
“Mayor Bass has been unequivocal for months — she reviewed an early draft of the report and only asked the LAFD to make sure it was accurate on issues like weather and budget. She and her staff made no changes to the drafts,” the statement provided to Fox News Digital asserted.
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A firefighter battles the Palisades Fire while it burns homes on Pacific Coast Highway amid a powerful windstorm on Jan. 8, 2025, in Los Angeles, Calif. (Apu Gomes/Getty Images)
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“The Mayor has been clear about her concerns regarding pre-deployment and the LAFD’s response to the fire, which is why there is new leadership at LAFD and why she called for an independent review of the Lachman Fire mop-up. There is absolutely no reason why she would request those details be altered or erased when she herself has been critical of the response to the fire – full stop,” Bass’ office added. “She has said this for months.”
“This is muckraking journalism at its lowest form. It is dangerous and irresponsible for Los Angeles Times reporters to rely on third hand unsourced information to make unsubstantiated character attacks to advance a narrative that is false,” the statement added.
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Alleged 764 member arrested, charged with CSAM possession in New York
A 23-year-old New York man allegedly affiliated with 764 was arrested and charged with receiving child sexual abuse material. Aaron Corey of Albany, N.Y., faces up to 20 years in prison for trafficking CSAM during a three-month period ending in December.
Corey, also known as “Baggeth,” is accused of running multiple 764-related chats, seeking CSAM from other people affiliated with the nihilistic violent extremist collective. Investigators said they found multiple images and videos of children, some as young as 2 years old, depicting child sexual abuse on Corey’s mobile device, according to a court records.
Officials also found evidence on Corey’s computer also, including a search for “parks near me for kids” and multiple visited URLs about relationships with minors. An FBI agent investigating Corey said his online moniker was potentially derived from his attempts to get girls to place bags over their heads, according to a criminal complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York.
“The 764 network is a depraved criminal group that exploits vulnerable children and revels in their abuse,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement. “The very serious crimes alleged in this indictment will be aggressively prosecuted until justice is served, as the Justice Department and federal partners continue efforts to take down this violent extremist network.”
Authorities have arrested multiple members of 764 during the past year, reflecting heightened law enforcement activity targeting the violent extremist collective and other offshoots affiliated with The Com. The FBI has long been investigating the group’s use of cybercriminal tactics to carry out their crimes.
The sprawling nihilistic network of thousands of people, typically between 11 and 25 years old, engages in a growing online threat to coerce vulnerable children to produce CSAM of themselves, gore material, self mutilation, sibling abuse, animal abuse and other acts of violence.
Two alleged leaders of 764, Leonidas Varagiannis and Prasan Nepal, were arrested and charged for directing and distributing CSAM in April. The two men are accused of exploiting at least eight minor victims, some as young as 13 years old, and face charges that carry a maximum penalty of life in prison.
Tony Christopher Long, of California, pleaded not guilty in November to multiple charges carrying a maximum penalty up to 69 years in prison related to his alleged involvement in the nihilistic violent extremist group.
Erik Lee Madison, of Maryland, was arrested in November and is accused of victimizing at least five children this fall, including one as young as 13 at the time. His alleged criminality dates back to 2020 when he was a minor.
Alexis Aldair Chavez, of San Antonio, pleaded guilty in December to multiple crimes involving the sexual exploitation of children while acting as an administrator and leader of 8884, a splinter group of 764. He faces up to 60 years in prison.
“Preying on our nation’s children, who are among the most vulnerable members of society, is beyond comprehension,” Christopher Raia, co-deputy director of the FBI, said in a statement.
Corey was arrested Monday, appeared in federal court Tuesday and is being detained pending his next court appearance. You can read the full criminal complaint below.
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What the US and Iran are about to negotiate over isn’t clear | Conflict
After weeks of military threats and arguments over a venue, the US and Iran are about to hold talks in Oman. But the two have still not decided on what topics are up for discussion. Al Jazeera’s Resul Serdar explains the disagreement.
Published On 5 Feb 2026
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Tate McRae responds to Olympics ad backlash with throwback photo
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Canadian-born pop star Tate McRae doubled down on her roots after fans were left outraged on social media by her support of Team USA in a recent ad promoting the Milan Cortina Olympics and Super Bowl LX.
McRae, who was born in Calgary, Alberta, appeared to intensify the sporting rivalry between Canada and the U.S. when she appeared in an ad for NBC. In the clip, shared on Instagram with her nine million followers, McRae expressed excitement about meeting U.S. athletes, including Olympic gold medalist Lindsey Vonn.
Lindsey Vonn competes during the Audi FIS Alpine Ski World Cup women’s downhill at the Prampero Slope on Monte Lussari. The event took place in Tarvisio, Italy, on Jan. 17, 2026. (Mattia Ozbot/Getty Images)
“I’m trying to get to Milan for an amazing opening ceremony and meet Team USA,” she said in the ad. “Gonna spend the week with some of America’s best skating for gold and Lindsey Vonn’s epic comeback. And back to the states for the big game, Super Bowl LX,” she said in the commercial.
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Amid rising political tensions between the two border nations – which made their way to the sporting world during the 4 Nations Face-Off, McRae’s support for Team USA did not appear to sit well with Canadians, who called her a “traitor” among other things.
But McRae took to social media to respond to the backlash, and perhaps reveal where her loyalties truly lie.
McRae posted a childhood picture of herself holding the Canadian flag with a caption that read, “… y’all know I’m Canada down.”
CANADIAN-BORN SINGER TATE MCRAE SPARKS FURY AFTER BACKING TEAM USA IN OLYMPICS AD: ‘TRAITOR’
But not everyone on social media appeared to accept McRae’s response.
“Yeah, no. Her saying ‘Y’all’ says otherwise,” one person wrote on X.
Tate McRae performs onstage during the 2025 iHeartRadio Music Festival at T-Mobile Arena. The performance took place in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Sept. 19, 2025. (Kevin Winter/Getty Images for iHeartRadio)
“Well then why support the US team? Sometimes it is important to support your own country and not just go for the money and especially during times like this,” another added.
“Damage control,” another response read.
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Backlash over McRae’s ad set the stage for escalating tensions between the U.S. and Canada.
Most recently in the skeleton competition, many Americans remain outraged over the absence of five-time Olympian Katie Uhlaender in Milan Cortina, after Team Canada was found to have manipulated an Olympic qualifier last month that prevented Uhlaender from being able to earn enough points to make this year’s Winter Games.
Katie Uhlaender (U.S.) competes in the women’s skeleton event at the Pyeongchang 2018 Olympic Winter Games at the Olympic Sliding Center in Pyeongchang, South Korea, on Feb. 17, 2018. (James Lang/USA TODAY Sports)
Fox News Digital’s Jackson Thompson contributed to this report.
Follow Fox News Digital’s sports coverage on X, and subscribe to the Fox News Sports Huddle newsletter.
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