You may have heard that the US Senate was unable to agree on a stopgap funding measure that would keep the government open by its midnight Friday deadline. This means the US is officially in a government shutdown. Here's what that means.

It seems that money talks. Loudly. Threatened with the possibility of having their products being banned from the Pentagon, the CEO of security software company Kaspersky has said he will hand his source code over to the US government to prove he’s not a Russian spy.

If you've been watching the Michael Flynn saga unfold in the US, in which Flynn has offered to testify about the Trump's administration's ties to Russia, you might be curious. Curious about what Flynn has to say, of course (wouldn't we like to know!) but also curious just simply about his strategy: Why now? Why not a month ago or a month from now? Perhaps you have asked yourself, "If I were part of some nefarious operation, be it organised crime or, say, merely colluding to adjust US policy to benefit a foreign power, how would I know precisely the right time to pull the rip cord on the prisoner's dilemma and offer to testify in exchange for immunity?"