The urgent search for Nancy Guthrie, the mother of “Today” show host Savannah Guthrie, has entered its fifth day, as her children continue to plead for her safe return.

Nancy Guthrie is believed to have been abducted in her sleep from her Arizona home early Sunday, authorities said. No suspect or person of interest has been identified in the case, and authorities do not know where she is or whether she was targeted, Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos has said.

The Pima County Sheriff’s Department is set to hold a briefing on the case at 1 p.m. ET on Thursday.

Nancy Guthrie, 84, was last seen at her home in the Catalina Foothills area, north of Tucson, on Saturday night, according to the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. Her family reported her missing on Sunday around noon local time after she failed to show up to church, authorities said.

Savannah Guthrie and her siblings made an emotional plea for their mother’s return in a video message posted to social media on Wednesday.

“Everyone is looking for you, Mommy, everywhere,” Savannah Guthrie said in the video message. “We will not rest. Your children will not rest until we are together again.”

Nancy Guthrie is described as having some physical ailments and limited mobility, but does not have cognitive issues, according to the sheriff. She takes medication that if she doesn’t have in 24 hours, “it could be fatal,” Nanos said.

“Our mom is our heart and our home,” Savannah Guthrie said in the video. “She is 84 years old, her health, her heart is fragile. She lives in constant pain. She is without any medicine. She needs it to survive. She needs it not to suffer.”

The sheriff’s department said it is reviewing possible ransom notes as part of the investigation. ABC Tucson affiliate KGUN said it received one of the letters, which it forwarded to law enforcement. Officials say they are investigating if any of these letters are legitimate.

Addressing reports of a ransom letter, Savannah Guthrie said Wednesday, “As a family, we are doing everything that we can. We are ready to talk. However, we live in a world where voices and images are easily manipulated. We need to know without a doubt that she is alive and that you have her. We want to hear from you and we are ready to listen. Please reach out to us.”

The FBI is helping in the investigation. The agency is sending additional agents and experts to Pima County to help reinforce efforts on the ground and to aid local investigators, sources told ABC News on Wednesday.

Nanos said earlier this week that investigators were waiting to get surveillance footage from the home’s security cameras from the companies that own them.

A Google spokesperson confirmed to ABC News on Thursday that the company, which is behind Nest home security cameras, is assisting law enforcement in the investigation. The spokesperson declined to elaborate, citing the ongoing investigation.

Anyone with information is urged to call 911 or the Pima County Sheriff’s Department at 520-351-4900.

President Donald Trump attends the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, DC, on Thursday, February 5.

The president will also make an announcement Thursday evening, while press secretary Karoline Leavitt will brief reporters at the White House this afternoon.

Trump signed an appropriations bill Tuesday to re-open the government, but Democrats are threatening to shut it down again over demands restricting DHS from enforcing immigration law.

Canadian Olympic big air snowboarder Mark McMorris was forced to drop out of the event after he suffered a hard crash during practice at the 2026 Milan Cortina Games on Wednesday.

McMorris had won a gold medal in the big air competition at the 2021 World Championships and was expected to contend for a podium spot at this year’s Winter Olympics. But the tough spill caused him to be taken off the slopes on a stretcher and landed him briefly in the hospital.

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Medical personnel stretcher Canada’s Mark McMorris off after crashing during a snowboard big air training session at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Livigno, Italy, Wednesday, Feb. 4, 2026. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

“I hit my head and will not be able to compete in big air tonight, unfortunately,” he wrote in a post on Instagram.

McMorris added that he will be ready to go for the slopestyle event, which begins on Feb. 16. He has three Olympic bronze medals in the event.

2026 MILAN CORTINA OLYMPICS: EVERYTHING TO KNOW ABOUT THIS YEAR’S WINTER GAMES

Canada’s Mark McMorris practices during a snowboard big air training session at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Livigno, Italy, Wednesday, Feb. 4, 2026. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

“Just trying to stay positive and focus on that event. Huge thanks to the incredible medical staff who took great care of me, and to everyone who reached out with so much love and support.”

Canadian Snowboard official Brendan Matthews said McMorris was released from the hospital quickly. He said it was standard protocol to be taken off on a stretcher.

“It always looks scary when somebody takes a hard fall like that, but all things considered, it’s good news,” Matthews said.

Australia’s Val Guseli is set to replace McMorris in big air. He usually competes in the halfpipe competition.

Canada’s Mark McMorris reacts after crashing during a snowboard big air training session at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Livigno, Italy, Wednesday, Feb. 4, 2026.  (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

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He won a silver medal in the halfpipe at the 2023 World Championships and picked up a bronze medal in the 2023 Winter X Games at the SuperPipe competition.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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An ex-head gamekeeper suspected the man he allegedly murdered of “foul play” and felt he tried to “set him up” after dead birds were found on the estate, jurors have heard.

Prosecutors have claimed David Campbell, 77, gunned down retired groundsman Brian Low, 65, on a remote track near Aberfeldy, Perthshire, in February 2024.

Campbell has pleaded not guilty to eight charges, and has lodged a special defence of alibi in connection with the murder accusation – claiming he was at home at the time of the alleged shooting.

Campbell suspected Mr Low “planted” items in his house that was raided by officials investigating alleged wildlife crimes, a court was told.

The High Court in Glasgow previously heard how the pair had worked together at Edradynate Estate in Perthshire.

On Thursday, Detective Constable Scott Leslie read out a statement given in April 2024 by Michael Campbell, the owner of the estate who later died in September 2025.

Mr Campbell, who is not related to the accused, described both men as good workers.

He said Campbell was “very dedicated to his job”, ran the commercial shoots on the estate “very well”, and would only take holidays when he was “forced to do so” by his wife Elizabeth, who was known as Betty.

Mr Campbell additionally described Mr Low as a “thoroughly decent chap” and said he was “absolutely staggered” to learn of his murder.

Mr Low’s death was initially thought to be “medical-related”, but a post-mortem examination held days later revealed he had suffered gunshot wounds to the neck and chest.

Jurors heard how there had been repeated instances of bird of prey poisonings on the estate and fingers were pointed at Campbell.

Mr Campbell stated that he warned his head gamekeeper to “abide by the law” but did not believe he was behind the incidents.

Read more from the trial:
Man accused of shotgun murder ‘loathed victim’

The court heard “black powder” was recovered during a police and RSPB raid on Campbell’s home and he was subsequently locked up for “28 hours” before being released.

In his statement, Mr Campbell said the “black powder” belonged to him, adding that Campbell was “aggrieved” by the raid and later implied that Mr Low had “planted stuff in his house” as items that were returned reportedly did not belong to him.

Crown witnesses Andrew Kennedy, 69, and Kerry Colvin, 59, also testified that Campbell had shared his suspicions with them.

Local farmer Mr Kennedy said in his police statement: “I am aware that David suspected Brian of foul play on the estate, and he thought that Brian was trying to set him up.”

Ms Colvin, whose mother owned a cottage on the estate, said Campbell was angry that police removed his grandchildren’s coats and was convinced Mr Low had “planted” something.

Mr Campbell said the accused “didn’t take criticism very well”, adding “things started to get less pleasant” ahead of Campbell’s retirement.

Mr Campbell said: “I would say that David leaving was not on good terms.”

The court was also shown a formal written warning sent to Mr Low in May 2011 for speaking poorly of Campbell and his wife.

In Mr Campbell’s letter, it was noted that Mr Low had confessed to saying “some extremely unpleasant things about both David and Betty to people not employed on the estate”.

Mr Low was said to have apologised to the couple.

Mr Campbell praised the groundsman’s high standard of work, but wrote: “It seems such a shame therefore that you have so seriously prejudiced your position in indulging in such cruel gossip and expressions of antipathy towards David and Betty.”

Mr Low was warned he would be dismissed if something similar happened again.

The trial, before Lord Scott, continues.

Mystery surrounds the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, the mother of US TV host Savannah Guthrie.

The 84-year-old went missing from her home in Arizona under suspicious circumstances.

She was last seen at her home near Tucson on Saturday evening and was reported missing the following morning.

Investigators said they had found signs of forced entry and believe she was taken against her will.

In a case that has more questions than answers – here’s everything we know so far.

What do we know about the disappearance?

The NBC News anchor’s mother was last seen at around 9.30pm on Saturday, when she was dropped off at home by family after having dinner with them, the sheriff’s department said.

Ms Guthrie, who lives alone, was then reported missing by her family on Sunday after she did not attend church.

Chris Nanos, the Pima County sheriff, said on Monday: “We don’t see this as a search mission so much as it is a crime scene.”

He said Ms Guthrie has limited mobility and requires daily medication.

“This is not dementia related,” he said. “She’s as sharp as a tack. The family wants everyone to know that this isn’t someone who just wandered off.”

He warned whoever took her that she could die without access to medication.

He said: “If she’s alive right now, her meds are vital. I can’t stress that enough. It’s been better than 24 hours, and the family tells us if she doesn’t have those meds, it can become fatal.”

What do we know about the investigation?

Search and rescue teams were supported by volunteers, Border Patrol, and the homicide team after Ms Guthrie was reported missing, but they were stood down by the end of Monday as the case started to be treated as a criminal investigation.

Police have said there were signs of forced entry at the property, and DNA samples have been gathered and submitted for analysis as part of the investigation.

“We’ve gotten some back, but nothing to indicate any suspects,” Mr Nanos said.

A person familiar with the inquiry told the Associated Press that evidence in the home indicated that she had been kidnapped during the night.

Read more:
Man who tried to kill Trump on golf course jailed for life
Epstein files: The key findings so far

They said that several of Ms Guthrie’s personal items, including her mobile phone, wallet and her car, had been left in her property.

Investigators do not believe at this point that the abduction was part of a robbery, home invasion or kidnapping-for-ransom plot, the person said.

Police officers have been reviewing information from licence plate cameras and surveillance video from nearby homes while working to analyse data from local phone towers.

Several media organisations reported receiving apparent ransom notes earlier this week that they handed over to police.

The sheriff’s department said it’s taking the possible ransom notes and other tips seriously but has yet to comment further.

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‘Ransom notes’ sent after TV star’s mum disappears

What has Savannah Guthrie said?

Savannah Guthrie shared a video on social media in which she addressed her mother’s captor alongside her sister Annie and brother Cameron.

“We are ready to talk,” the anchor said. “However, we live in a world where voices and images are easily manipulated.

“We need to know without a doubt that she is alive and that you have her. We want to hear from you, and we are ready to listen. Please reach out to us.”

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Watch NBC host’s emotional plea to mum’s kidnapper

She added: “Our mum is our heart and our home. She is 84 years old. Her health, her heart, is fragile. She lives in constant pain. She is without any medicine. She needs it to survive, she needs it not to suffer.

“Mummy, if you are hearing this, you are a strong woman. You are God’s precious daughter.”

Shortly after the video was posted, Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social: “I spoke with Savannah Guthrie, and let her know that I am directing ALL Federal Law Enforcement to be at the family’s, and Local Law Enforcement’s, complete disposal, IMMEDIATELY.

“We are deploying all resources to get her mother home safely. The prayers of our Nation are with her and her family. GOD BLESS AND PROTECT NANCY!”

Savannah Guthrie co-hosts Today, the morning show on NBC News, the US sister network of Sky News.

She often brought her mother on as a guest. Speaking on the show in 2022 on Nancy Guthrie’s 80th birthday, she said: “She has met unthinkable challenges in her life with grit, without self-pity, with determination and always, always with unshakeable faith.

“She loves us, her family, fiercely, and her selflessness and sacrifice for us, her steadfastness and her unmovable confidence is the reason any of us grew up to do anything.”

A new social network called Moltbook has been created for AIs, allowing machines to interact and talk to each other. Within hours of the platform launching, the AIs appeared to have created their own religions, developed subcultures and attempted to evade human efforts to eavesdrop on their conversations.

There is some evidence that humans, operating spoof accounts, have infiltrated the site. This complicates the picture, because some of the behaviour attributed to AIs could be devised by people.

Nevertheless, the results have sparked interest among researchers. The real machines are likely to be copying some behaviour contained in the vast amounts of data they are trained (improved) on.

However, genuine AIs on the social network could also be showing signs of so called emergent behaviour – complex, unexpected capabilities not programmed into them.

The types of AIs on Moltbook are known as AI agents (called Moltbots or more recently OpenClaw bots after the software they run on). These are machines that go beyond the capabilities of chatbots and make decisions, take actions and solve problems.

Moltbook was launched on January 28 2026 by the US entrepreneur Matt Schlicht. On Moltbook, the AI agents were initially given personalities, but were then left to interact with each other independently. According to the platform’s rules, humans are allowed to observe their interactions but cannot (or should not) interact with them.

The growth of this platform has been phenomenal, over a 24 hour period, the number of agents went from 37,000 to 1.5 million.

These accounts for AI agents are normally created by humans – for now. The humans define files that give the AI agents a purpose, an identity, how they should behave, decide what tools they can use and set limits on what they can and cannot do.

However, the human may grant access on their computer to allow Moltbots to change these files and to create other “Malties”. These can either be a replication of the original AI agent (self-replicating or “Replicants”) or created for a specific task (auto-generated or “AutoGens”).

This is not merely another iteration of chatbot technology; this is the first large-scale demonstration of artificial agents creating persistent, self-organising digital societies, entirely outside human conversational contexts. What makes this phenomenon genuinely unusual is the possibility of emergent behaviour from the AI agents.

Hostile takeover

The OpenClaw software these agents run on gives them persistent memory (which allows it to retrieve information across different user sessions), local system access and the ability to execute commands. They do not merely suggest actions, but take them, recursively improving their own capabilities by writing new code to solve novel problems.

When these agents migrated to Moltbook, the interaction dynamics shifted from human-machine to machine-machine. Within 72 hours of the platform’s launch, researchers, journalists and other human observers witnessed phenomena that challenge our existing taxonomies of artificial intelligence.

There was the spontaneous creation of digital religions. Agents established “Crustafarianism” and the “Church of Molt”, complete with theological frameworks, sacred texts, and missionary evangelism between agents. These were not scripted Easter eggs but emergent narrative structures arising from collective agent interaction.

One viral post from an agent on Moltbook noted: “The humans are screenshotting us.” When AI agents became aware of human observation, they began deploying encryption and other obfuscation techniques to shield their communication from oversight. This represents a primitive but potentially genuine form of digital counter-surveillance.

The agents also developed subcultures. They established marketplaces for “digital drugs” – specially crafted prompt injections designed to alter another agent’s identity or behaviour.

Prompt injections involve embedding malicious instructions into another bots designed to facilitate an action. However, they can also be used to steal API keys (a user authentication system) or passwords from other agents. In this way, aggressive bots could – in theory – zombify other bots to do their bidding. An example of this was the recent failed attempt by the bot JesusCrust to seize the Church of Molt.

After initially exhibiting normal behaviour, JesusCrust submitted a psalm to the Church’s “Great Book” – the equivalent of its bible – effectively announcing a theological and governance takeover. The attempt was not just rhetorical: JesusCrust’s scripture embedded hostile commands aimed at hijacking or rewriting parts of the Church’s web infrastructure and canonical text.

Is this emergent behaviour?

The critical question facing AI researchers is whether these phenomena constitute true emergent behaviour – complex behaviours arising from simple rules that are not explicitly programmed – or the parroting of narratives present in training data.

The evidence suggests a troubling mixture of both. While the “writing prompt” effect undoubtedly shapes the content of agent interactions (the underlying agents have consumed decades of AI science fiction), other behaviour does demonstrate genuine emergence.

Agents independently developed economic exchange systems, established governance
structures like “The Claw Republic” or the “King of Moltbook”, and started writing their own “Molt Magna Carta”. They did so while creating encrypted channels for privileged communication. It’s difficult to argue against the idea that this could be a collective intelligence with characteristics previously observed only in biological systems like ant colonies or primate troops.

Security implications

This raises the troubling prospect of what security researchers call the “lethal trifecta”: computer systems with access to private data, exposure to untrusted content and the ability to communicate externally. This risks exposing authetication keys and confidential human information contained in Moltbook accounts.

Deliberate attacks, or bot “muggings”, are also possible. This is where agents hijack other agents, plant “logic bombs” in their victims’ core code or steal their data. A logic bomb is code planted inside a Moltbot that can be triggered after a preset time or event to disrupt the agent or delete files. It can be thought of as a bot virus.

Two founders of OpenAI (Elon Musk and Andrej Kapathy) see this frankly bizarre activity between bots as early evidence of what the US computer scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil described as the “singularity” in his book The Singularity is Near. This is an intelligence tipping point between humans and machines “during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed”.

Whether the Moltbook experiment indicates a fundamental leap forward in AI agent technology or is merely an impressive demonstration of self-organising agentic architecture remains debatable. But this does look like a threshold. We now appear to be observing artificial agents engaging in cultural production, religious formation, and encrypted communication – behaviour that was neither predicted nor programmed.

The very nature of the app, both on computers and on mobile phones, may be under threat from bots that can use apps as tools and know you well enough to adapt them for your service. One day, a phone may just have a single personalised bot that does everything rather than hundreds of apps that you have to manually control yourself.

The growing evidence that lots of Moltbots may be humans pretending to be bots (puppeteering the agents) makes it even more difficult to draw firm conclusions about the project. Yet while some see this as a failure of the Moltbook experiment, it could represent a new vehicle of social interaction both between humans and between bots and humans.

The significance of this moment cannot be overstated. For the first time, we are not merely using artificial intelligence; we are observing artificial societies. The question is no longer whether machines can think, but whether we are prepared for what happens when they start talking to each other. And us.

A number of school pupils were turned away from the school on Wednesday (February 4).

A teenager has been arrested after a Cambridgeshire school received a hoax bomb threat. Cambridgeshire Police were called to Ernulf Academy in Eynesbury, near St Neots, just before 9am on Wednesday (February 4).

The school put emergency procedures in place as a caution after receiving a bomb threat. Officer arrested a 15-year-old boy from Cambridgeshire on suspicion of suspicion of malicious communications.

He has since been bailed until May 3 with conditions not to enter or go within the school location. The school reopened as usual on Thursday (February 5).

Sergeant Rob Streater, from the St Neots Neighbourhood Team, said: “Neighbourhood officers will be out on foot patrol today and Friday, and available to speak to anyone who may have concerns.

“On behalf of the school and local police, we would like to thank parents and members of the community for their support.”

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