Kash Patel, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation, pushed back in his confirmation hearing after he was grilled on the president’s pardoning of January 6 rioters.

"So do you think that America is safer because the 1600 people have been given an opportunity to come out of serving their sentences and live in our communities again?" Dem. Sen. Dick Durbin asked Patel in Thursday’s hearing, pressing him on January 6 rioters who assaulted police officers having their sentences commuted earlier this month.

Patel responded with a reference to Biden’s decision in the final hours of his presidency to free Leonard Peltier, a far-left activist convicted in the 1975 murders of two FBI special agents, Ronald Williams and Jack Coler, who were gunned down in a shootout in South Dakota.

"Senator, I have not looked at all 1600 individual cases," Patel said.

DOZENS OF FORMER FBI AGENTS RALLY AROUND KASH PATEL'S CONFIRMATION: 'LIVES HAVE BEEN SHATTERED'

"I have always advocated for imprisoning those that cause harm to our law enforcement and civilian communities. I also believe America is not safer because President Biden's commutation of a man who murdered two FBI agents. Agent Coler and Williams family deserve better than to have the man that point blank range fired a shotgun into their heads and murdered them, released from prison. So it goes both ways."

Durbin responded by downplaying the comparison between Peltier and January 6 rioters.

MAJOR FBI CHANGES KASH PATEL COULD MAKE ON DAY 1 IF CONFIRMED AS DIRECTOR

"Leonard Peltier was in prison for 45 years," Durbin responded. "He's 80 years old, and he was sentenced to home confinement. So he's not free. As you might have just suggested. He killed two FBI agents. That he did, and he went to prison for it and should have. My question to you, though, is, do you think America's safer because President Trump issued these pardons to 1600 of these criminal defendants, many of whom violently assaulted our police in capital?"

Patel responded, "Senator, America will be safe when we don't have 200,000 drug overdoses in two years, America will be safe when we don't have 50 homicides a day."

Conservatives and supporters of Patel on social media praised Patel for his response.

"Brutal reality check," political commentator and Confirm 47 executive director Camryn Kinsey posted on X.

In his opening remarks, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley said, "Public trust in the FBI is low."

"Only 41% of the American public thinks the FBI is doing a good job. This is the lowest rating in a century," he continued.

Grassley touted Patel's experience as a public defender and at the Justice Department, as well as his involvement in the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in 2017 to investigate the origins of the Trump-Russia probe.

Patel has "managed large intelligence and defense bureaucracies, identified and countered national security threats, prosecuted and defended criminals," Grassley said. "He has done this while fighting for transparency and accountability in the government," giving him "precisely the qualifications we need at this time" to head up the bureau.

Patel's nomination has sparked early criticism from some Democrats ahead of his confirmation hearing, who have cited his previous vows to prosecute journalists and career officials at the Justice Department and FBI that he sees as being part of the "deep state."

Fox News Digital's Breanne Deppisch contributed to this report

Rwanda says South Africa is in “no position to take on the role of a peacemaker or mediator” in DR Congo.

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek provoked the first Silicon Valley freak-out of 2025 after releasing open versions of AI models that compete with the best technology OpenAI, Meta, and Google have to offer. DeepSeek claims to have built its models highly efficiently and quickly, and is providing these models at a fraction of the price American […]

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ElevenLabs, one of the more popular startups working in the field AI audio, said Thursday that it has raised a Series C round of $180 million, valuing the company at $3.3 billion post-money. a16z and ICONIQ Growth are co-leading investment. Rumors of the fundraise were first reported by TechCrunch. The final numbers confirm some but […]

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• UPS is cutting its business with Amazon in half by mid-2026, it said Thursday.
• While big, Amazon's business with UPS was becoming less profitable, CEO Carol Tomé said.
• Amazon has been building out its own logistics infrastructure in recent years.

UPS is reducing the number of Amazon packages it handles as profit from those shipments shrink, its CEO said Thursday.

"This was not their ask," CEO Carol Tomé said on an investor call. "This was us. This was UPS taking control of our destiny."

Shares plunged as much as 18%.

The shipping giant said it would cut its business with its largest customer in half by June 2026. Amazon shipments make up about 20% of UPS's volume in the US, CFO Brian Dykes said on the call. The company had reported fourth-quarter results before the stock market opened.

"Amazon is our largest customer, but it's not our most profitable customer," CEO Tomé said on the call. "Its margin is very dilutive to the US domestic business."

UPS used recent contract negotiations with Amazon to reach an agreement on the drawdown, Tomé said. Keeping the same amount of business with the retail giant "will likely result in diminishing returns," she added.

"Due to their operational needs, UPS requested a reduction in volume, and we certainly respect their decision," an Amazon spokesperson told Business Insider. "We'll continue to partner with them and many other carriers to serve our customers."

While the move away from Amazon will cost UPS business in the short run, the company could use it to "focus in on higher-yielding, margin-enhancing volumes," analysts at Goldman Sachs wrote on Thursday.

Tomé said that the remaining 50% of UPS's business with the e-commerce giant includes handling some returns for Amazon — something that UPS does "very, very well" for them and is unlikely to go away anytime soon.

"We have 5,200 UPS store locations that make it very convenient for customers of Amazon to return their Amazon packages," she said on Thursday's call.

Amazon has spent years building its logistics services, from warehouses to its aircraft fleet.

The company has used those resources to offer its own shipping options. Late last year, Amazon launched a new option for sellers on its website that can deliver products from source factories to customers, for instance.

Amazon also offers shipping options to sellers who don't even sell on its website.

• Blackstone has been investing billions in the AI revolution, including billions in data centers.
• Chinese AI model DeepSeek is raising questions about whether these investments will pay off.
• The stock declined more than 4% Thursday despite the company's stellar earnings report.

A top Blackstone executive on Thursday addressed the threat that AI model DeepSeek could pose to the company's multibillion-dollar bet on AI infrastructure, saying the firm is watching the situation closely.

"We've obviously been spending a lot of time the last week looking at the impact of DeepSeek," president and COO Jon Gray said in a fourth-quarter earnings call, adding: "The real question is what is demand going forward?"

Blackstone, which calls itself the largest data-center provider in the world, has $80 billion in existing data center assets — and has touted more than $100 billion in the pipeline. Gray didn't address the firm's pipeline but acknowledged that "the cost of computing is coming down pretty dramatically," which could change demand for future investments in how AI is powered.

"So we still think it's a very important segment, and there's a way to run, but obviously, we're watching what's happening very closely," he said.

Blackstone is the latest company to react to concerns that DeepSeek, an AI model from China, is 20 to 40 times more efficient than OpenAI, according to an analysis by Bernstein. This has called into question both Silicon Valley valuations and trillions in AI infrastructure investment.

Blackstone's share price, which had opened up nearly 1.5%, dropped at the market open and recently traded down more than 4% to $177.50 a share. Blackstone's earnings handily beat expectations, with the firm setting a record for fee-related earnings in the fourth quarter.

Gray suggested that lower costs could drive more adoption and, therefore, more demand for infrastructure, echoing statements from tech CEOs like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Gray's comments reflect Silicon Valley's new favorite economic theory, the Jevons Paradox, which posits that usage will increase as the price of a resource declines.

Citing Mark Zuckerberg's comments on Wednesday, he said that data centers might need to be more "fungible" than before, which may mean "less training" of AI models but potentially more "inference," the practice of using AI to come to predictions or conclusions, as well as increased demand for cloud or enterprise usage.

The larger picture, that "our lives are migrating online" has not changed, Gray said. He also said the firm's $80 billion in data center assets is tied to existing demand via leases to large, well-capitalized companies.

"We're not doing things speculatively," Gray said. "It's based on the demand signals from our tenants.

Blackstone's investment in data centers began in earnest when the firm took data center REIT QTS Realty Trust private in 2021 for $10 billion. It's continued to make big bets like its $16 billion-plus take-private last year of AirTrunk, the largest data center transaction of all time.

During an earnings call last year, CEO and cofounder Steve Schwarzman announced his ambitions for the firm to be the world's largest investor in AI infrastructure.

He projected $2 trillion in global investment to build and facilitate data centers over the next five years and that the AI revolution would contribute to a 40% increase in electricity demand in the US over the next decade.

This has already spurred the firm to invest in adjacent sectors, like its recent $1 billion purchase of a Virginia power plant in a data center hot spot.

Blackstone has been ahead of the curve in this strategy, and other investors are now jumping in. A KPMG survey found that 40% of US asset manager respondents told KPMG that it's their top real estate investment priority over the next two years, up from 27% just six months ago.

Although DeepSeek could threaten demand for data centers, China isn't turning away from investing in AI infrastructure either. China recently announced a roughly $140 billion investment in data centers.

Alongside Samsung’s Galaxy S25, S25+, and Galaxy S25 Ultra pre-order push, it has also now launched a massive Super Bowl smart TV sale with deals starting from $250 alongside up to $1,300 off The Frame, up to $2,100 off OLED models, and much more. From there, we move over to the mobile computing space – you can once again score $50 off the OnePlus Pad 2 with a FREE $150 keyboard case alongside Lenovo’s latest touchscreen Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition Copilot+ PC at $400 off. Those offers sit alongside the best price of the year on the latest Google Nest Learning Thermostat (4th Gen) and the launch of NVIDIA’s exciting new RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 GPUs. All of that and more awaits below in today’s 9to5Toys Lunch Break.

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TSMC is a major Apple partner, producing chips for its many hundreds of millions of new devices each year. But per the company’s founder, there was once a time when Intel got a shot at iPhone chip production, and failed to impress.

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Today’s best deals in Apple gear and accessories include Apple Watch Series 10 at up to $136 off alongside ongoing Black Friday pricing across the entire lineup. These offers join the $110 price drop on Apple Watch Ultra 2, but Amazon has also brought back the most affordable M4 MacBook Pro at the lowest we have tracked with $200 in savings alongside a massive $400 price drop on select M4 Max MacBook Pro configs for folks looking to score a real beast of a new laptop. Satechi is running a serious 50% sale on its desktop and workstation accessories, plus you’ll find everything else down below. 

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News outlets went into breaking news mode on Wednesday night when an American Airlines flight collided with a military helicopter over the Potomac River while approaching Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C. As of Thursday morning, officials have indicated that there are no survivors from the horrific incident. 64 people were onboard American Eagle Flight...