Federal agents on Thursday announced the arrest of a suspect charged with planting the two pipe bombs discovered near the US Capitol complex on the eve of January 6, 2021. Authorities identified the man as Brian J. Cole Jr., a resident of Woodbridge, Virginia. The arrest marks a major break in a case that has vexed authorities for nearly five years.

Cole, 30, is charged with transporting an explosive device across state lines with the intent to kill, injure, intimidate, or destroy property and with attempting to damage and destroy the headquarters of the Republican and Democratic national committees by means of an explosive device. If convicted, he would face the prospect of decades in prison.

According to an affidavit, investigators linked Cole to the bombs through a combination of surveillance footage, historical cell-site data, and years of purchase records showing he bought each major component used to construct the devices. Agents allege Cole acquired the same model of galvanized pipe, matching end caps, and nine-volt connectors, among other items, across multiple hardware stores in northern Virginia in 2019 and 2020.

Cole continued buying components used in bomb-making after his bombs in the Capitol were discovered, agents allege, listing the purchase of a white kitchen timer and two nine-volt batteries from a Walmart on January 21, as well as galvanized pipes from Home Depot the following day.

Senior Trump administration officials quickly cast the arrest as a vindication of their own leadership, claiming the case had gone cold. Attorney General Pam Bondi said she hoped the arrest would restore public trust following what she characterized as a “total lack of movement” on a case that had “languished for four years.” In their telling, the breakthrough was proof that the case only advanced once they were empowered to “go get the bad guys” and stop “focusing on other extraneous things,” as FBI deputy director Dan Bongino put it.

“Though it had been nearly five years, our team continued to churn through massive amounts of data and tips that we used to identify this suspect,” said Darren Cox, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s criminal investigative division.

The bombs were planted near the headquarters of the Republican and Democratic national committees the night of January 5, 2021, as Congress prepared to certify Joe Biden’s electoral victory over Donald Trump. Both failed to detonate, but their discovery the following day added to the chaos and confusion unfolding as a pro-Trump mob stormed the US Capitol building, causing millions of dollars in damage and injuring approximately 140 Capitol and Metropolitan Police Department officers.

The T10 also includes a voice-cloning feature similar to those offered by the Vasco Q1 and the Google Pixel 10. With this function, you recite a few sample sentences, press the “clone” button, and in a few minutes, you can have the T10 speak in a simulacrum of your own voice instead of its generic “male” or “female” tones. This system is much more impressive than Vasco’s, based on my testing, with my cloned voice sounding eerily like my own, just with a rich Spanish, Russian, or Tamil accent applied. Note that by default, the app can only store one cloned voice at a time.

The 60-mAh battery charges via USB-C and promises 15 hours of continuous usage and 100 days of standby time. That’s tough to test thoroughly, as the device automatically shuts itself off after just a few minutes of disuse. Despite many hours of testing over several days, the in-app battery indicator never wavered from a 100-percent charge.

The Subscription Push

The T10 is a capable, if complex, translation system, and I’d be more enamored with it if not for the fact that it includes only 180 days of service before you are pressed to upgrade to one of two subscription plans. For $14 per month or $100 per year, you receive 600 minutes per month of service across many of its real-time features. For $25 per month or $179 per year, that moves up to unlimited service (and adds a second voice cloning slot). Without a subscription, users get just 120 minutes of real-time translations per month and lose call translation and AI Mind Map features completely. The cross-app translation feature, face-to-face mode, and text/photo translations are free across all modes.

Another major issue I had with the T10 is how rough the InnAIO Pro app is. The badly translated interface is particularly troubling, not just because a good portion of it is in pidgin English but because some of it isn’t translated at all. For example, if you save a recording of a real-time translation session, the identities of the two languages used in the recording appear in Chinese.

The T10 has a novel approach and some unique features you won’t find in competing gear or on a phone app, but at present, it’s all too haphazard and undercooked to wholly recommend. The push for a very costly subscription after such a short period of free access makes that calculus all the more difficult.

The Home Office has formally opened a consultation on the use of facial recognition by UK police, saying the government is committed to introducing a legal framework that sets out clear rules for the technology.

Initially announced by policing minister Sarah Jones in early October 2025, the 10-week consultation will allow interested parties and members of the public to share their views on how the controversial technology should be regulated.

While the use of live facial recognition (LFR) by police – beginning with the Met’s deployment at Notting Hill Carnival in August 2016 – has ramped up massively in recent years, there has so far been minimal public debate or consultation, with the Home Office claiming for years that there is already “comprehensive” legal framework in place.

The Home Office has now said that although a “patchwork” legal framework for police facial recognition exists (including for the increasing use of the retrospective and “operator-initiated” versions of the technology), it does not give police themselves the confidence to “use it at significantly greater scale … nor does it consistently give the public the confidence that it will be used responsibly”.

It added that the current rules governing police LFR use are “complicated and difficult to understand”, and that an ordinary member of the public would be required to read four pieces of legislation, police national guidance documents and a range of detailed legal or data protection documentation from individual forces to fully understand the basis for LFR use on their high streets.

The Home Office further added that it will consider whether any new framework would also cover the police use of “other biometric and inferential technologies”, including voice and gait recognition, as well as emotion detection algorithms that can “help police spot behaviour associated with criminal activity” or identify suicidal intent in members of the public.

“Although police use of facial recognition has prompted the government to examine the law in this area, other technologies with similar characteristics pose similar questions, such as in what circumstances can their use be justified?” it said. “This consultation therefore asks more broadly about principles that could be applied to a wider range of technologies, which all have the potential to interfere with people’s rights.”