My colleagues didn’t believe me when I told them all my app icons looked slightly crooked after updating my iPhone 16 Pro to iOS 26 and getting Apple’s new Liquid Glass user interface.

I told our staff reporter Kyle Barr—an all-round consumer tech guru, mind you—to look at my home screen and tell me that my icons were tilting slightly to the left, like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. “I don’t see it,” he said, trying to convince me there was no slanting. He checked his own newly updated iPhone 14 Pro and didn’t see any tilted icons, either.

Turns out we are both correct.

To create the effect of glass and all of its reflective and shimmering properties, iOS 26 forces every icon on your iPhone home screen to have a slight glow to them in the top left and lower right corners. This gives the subtlest parallax effect when you tilt your iPhone, creating the illusion that they’ve got the thinnest layer of depth.

Against most home screen wallpapers—particularly more colorful ones—app icons do not appear skewed to the eye. All the hues draw attention away from the refractive app corners. But that’s not the case with many dark wallpapers, or solid black like I have on my iPhone. On top of a pure black wallpaper and with the icons set to “Dark,” “Clear,” or “Tinted,” everything looks tilted. I’ve found it just a little bit disorienting and kind of frustrating if I look at my home screen for more than a few seconds.

I’m not the only one bothered by this optical illusion. A post on r/ios has over 2.5K upvotes and nearly 500 comments at the time of writing. “The frame glow effect makes apps look tilted, and it’s really distracting for me (I even feel a bit dizziness),” wrote user tantunidevourer.

People who hadn’t noticed it after updating their iPhones confirmed the tilted icons. “I hadn’t noticed it at the first glance, but now I can’t unsee the tilted app icons,” wrote user Silacko. Another Reddit user, OrganicCoffeeBean, said, “This update is making me feel drunk.”

Some users have suggested turning off the parallax effect buried within the Accessibility section within the Settings app. Apple added a “Reduce Motion” setting after users complained about the zooming in/out icon animations in iOS 7 causing dizziness and nausea. (I was one of those users who felt nauseous at the zooming icon effect.) Turning on Reduce Motion kills the animations, and the additional “Prefer Cross-Fade Transitions” setting further helps “reduce the motion for user interface controls that slide in when appearing and disappearing,” according to Apple’s description. I turned on both settings and can confirm that it doesn’t remove the refractive app icon corners. Maybe Apple will add another toggle to the ever-growing section under Accessibility in a future software update. At this point, why not just let users decide how liquidy and glassy they want iOS 26 on their devices with some kind of slider setting that lets you adjust the transparency?

With Liquid Glass, Apple was going for a unified design language that runs across all of its products, from the iPhone to iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple TV. Some people like the fluid-like interface; others hate it. If you’re the latter, you can make Liquid Glass less liquidy and glassy with a few Accessibility tweaks.

I wouldn’t go as far as to say all of iOS 26 is an “optical nightmare,” like Reddit user demenghi, but I do think there’s room for improvement, or at the very least, more customization needs to be added.

ACCRA, Ghana (AP) — Authorities in Ghana pushed back Tuesday on claims that four African immigrants recently deported by the U.S. remain in Ghanaian detention, reiterating their assertion that all such migrants have been returned to their home countries.

The government said Monday that all 14 of the deportees had been returned to their countries of origin in West Africa. On Tuesday, Ghana’s presidential spokesperson Felix Kwakye Ofosu said in an interview with The Associated Press that 13 Nigerians were sent home on a bus and that one Gambian was sent home on a plane.

Lawyers for four of the Nigerians said in U.S. court filings Monday and in interviews with the AP that the four were still being held in a facility in Ghana. The lawyers said the Nigerians faced persecution in their home country, but a judge rejected their request for a court order to return them to the U.S., though she expressed alarm over the deportations.

The Ghanaian government spokesperson denied knowledge of such a facility. “None of them are staying in this country. Nobody is being held in any camp and nobody’s right has been abused,” Ofosu said of the deportees in a phone interview.

The AP could not independently verify the current location of the deportees. However, a lawyer for the Gambian individual, from a different law firm, confirmed that their client was in Gambia.

Nigerian and Gambian government officials told the AP they were neither notified about the deportations nor involved in the process.

US judge won’t intervene in the deportations

Meanwhile, a U.S. judge said that she was powerless to prevent Ghana from returning deportees in its custody to their home countries, declining to intervene in the case, in a victory for the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan said that although five of the African deportees had been barred from being sent directly from the U.S. to their home countries because of a likelihood of persecution, her “hands are tied” once they are in Ghana.

Still, she said that the deportations appeared to be against an international treaty on torture, saying she was “alarmed and dismayed” by the “government’s cavalier acceptance of Plaintiffs’ ultimate transfer to countries where they face torture and persecution.”

Chutkan distinguished it from the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was deemed by courts to have been wrongly sent by the administration to a prison in his native El Salvador. In the Africa case, unlike in Abrego Garcia, she wrote, the administration could legally send the deportees to Ghana.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Trump administration has been seeking ways to deter immigrants from entering the U.S. illegally and remove those who already have done so, especially those accused of crimes and including those who cannot easily be deported to their home countries.

The administration, faced with court decisions that people can’t be sent back to their home countries, has increasingly been trying to send them to third countries under agreements with those governments.

Ghana has joined Eswatini, Rwanda and South Sudan as African countries that have received migrants from third countries who were deported from the U.S.

The lawsuit filed on behalf of some of the migrants said they were held in “straitjackets” for 16 hours on a flight to Ghana on Sept. 5 and detained for days in “squalid conditions” after they arrived there. It said Ghana was doing the Trump administration’s “dirty work.”

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Riccardi reported from Colorado and Asadu from Dakar, Senegal. Associated Press writer Abdoulie John in Banjul, Gambia, contributed.

Robert Redford, star of Hollywood classics including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting and All the President’s Men, has died aged 89.

In a statement, his publicist Cindi Berger said the actor died on Tuesday at his home “at Sundance in the mountains of Utah – the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved”.

“He will be missed greatly,” Berger said, adding that Redford’s family are requesting privacy.

Redford was one of the defining movie stars of the 1970s, crossing with ease between the Hollywood new wave and the mainstream film industry, before also becoming an Oscar-winning director and producer in the ensuing decades. He played a key role in the establishment of American independent cinema by co-founding the Sundance film festival, which acted as a platform for films such as Reservoir Dogs, The Blair Witch Project, Donnie Darko, Fruitvale Station and Coda.

Redford also acquired a reputation as one of Hollywood’s leading liberals and campaigned on environmental issues, including acting as a trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council advocacy group and vocally opposing the now cancelled Keystone XL pipeline extension.

Born Charles Robert Redford in 1936, he grew up in Los Angeles and, after he was expelled from the University of Colorado, studied acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. After playing a series of small parts on TV, stage and film, he began to make headway in the early 60s, being nominated for a best supporting actor Emmy in 1962 for The Voice of Charlie Pont and winning a lead role in the original 1963 Broadway production of Neil Simon’s hit play Barefoot in the Park. Redford’s film breakthrough arrived in 1965: an eye-catching role as a bisexual film star in Inside Daisy Clover opposite Natalie Wood, for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe.

After a series of solid Hollywood films, including The Chase and a screen adaptation of Barefoot in the Park, Redford had a huge hit with the 1969 outlaw western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, in which he starred opposite Paul Newman and Katharine Ross. It was nominated for seven Oscars, though none were for the actors.

Redford starred in Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, the first directing credit in over 20 years by former blacklistee Abraham Polonsky, and then a string of key 1970s hits: frontier western Jeremiah Johnson (1972), period romance The Way We Were (1973) opposite Barbra Streisand, crime comedy The Sting (1973), again opposite Newman, and literary adaptation The Great Gatsby (1974). Redford followed these up with conspiracy thriller Three Days of the Condor (1975) and Watergate drama All the President’s Men (1976), co-starring with Dustin Hoffman.

After a prolonged break from acting in the late 70s, Redford turned to directing with the ensemble drama Ordinary People, adapted from the novel by Judith Guest. A substantial hit, it won four Oscars in 1981, including best picture and best director for Redford – an accolade he never received for his acting.

His success as an actor continued in the 1980s and 1990s, though perhaps with less of the cutting-edge impact of his 1970s work. Baseball drama The Natural, adapted from a Bernard Malamud novel in 1984, was followed by Out of Africa in 1985, in which he played big game hunter Denys Finch Hatton opposite Meryl Streep’s Danish aristocrat. He returned to directing with The Milagro Beanfield War in 1988 and A River Runs Through It in 1992, both grappling in different ways with rural America. A year later he made what in retrospect was something of a turning point: an unalloyed Hollywood project, the erotic thriller Indecent Proposal, in which his businessman character offers a million dollars to sleep with Demi Moore’s character. It re-established Redford as a commercial force. Later in the 90s he directed Quiz Show and The Horse Whisperer (the latter of which he also starred in).

It was in this period that the Sundance film festival – which Redford’s production company had co-founded in 1978 as the Utah/US film festival and renamed in 1984 after Redford’s Sundance Institute – began to exert its influence as a showcase for US independent cinema, promoting the likes of Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez and Kevin Smith. Its impact only increased in subsequent decades as a forum for boosting films’ commercial chances and achieving awards recognition, showcasing films such as 500 Days of Summer, Napoleon Dynamite, Whiplash, Fruitvale Station and Coda.

Redford’s 2007 Afghan war film Lions for Lambs was a disappointment, but an impressive solo performance in the 2013 survival-at-sea drama All Is Lost went some way to compensating for it. In 2014 Redford joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Hydra leader Alexander Pierce in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. He said at the time: “I wanted to experience this new form of film-making that’s taken over, where you have kind of cartoon characters brought to life through high technology.” He made a cameo in the same role in Avengers: Endgame in 2019.

In the mid-2010s Redford scaled back his film-making activities, handing over stewardship of the Sundance film festival and announcing his retirement from acting. His final substantial role was in the 2018 crime drama The Old Man & the Gun, directed by David Lowery.

Redford was awarded an honorary Oscar in 2002, a lifetime achievement Golden Lion from the Venice film festival in 2017, and an honorary César in 2019. In 2010 he was also made a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur and in 2016 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama.

Redford was married twice: to historian Lola Van Wagenen between 1958 and 1985, with whom he had four children, and artist Sibylle Szaggars in 2009.