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Scientists call for international body to oversee advanced AI, saying voluntary commitments are not enough

Scientists call for international body to oversee advanced AI, saying voluntary commitments are not enough

Reuters reports: Around 400 scientists, including AI pioneers Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, on Tuesday called for an international body ​to oversee containment standards and incident reporting for advanced cyber-capable ‌AI systems. The proposed body would set industry-wide containment standards and maintain a registry of significant security incidents, which the scientists said should eventually be made ​public. In an open letter, the researchers said frontier AI models ​should initially be air-gapped from external networks and subject ⁠to independent oversight, arguing…

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Call for investigation of raid on Ilan Omar’s home: ‘This is the textbook case’ of violating the Hatch Act

Call for investigation of raid on Ilan Omar’s home: ‘This is the textbook case’ of violating the Hatch Act

The New York Times reports: The president on Tuesday suggested on social media that Ms. Omar had engaged in fraud to make millions of dollars. He also suggested she had engaged in immigration fraud. “America wants answers, and we want them, NOW!” he said. Randall D. Eliason, a former federal prosecutor and retired law professor, said that the Trump Justice Department had so eroded trust that it had “sort of forfeited the right to a presumption of regularity,” a legal…

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Mark Zuckerberg’s Muse is a digital panopticon disguised as an imp

Mark Zuckerberg’s Muse is a digital panopticon disguised as an imp

Ariana Bindman writes: According to an October report from Yahoo Finance, Muse has been downloaded at least 5 million times since its launch in early September, earning 3 million concurrent users per week. Marketed as a round-the-clock digital serf whose entire existence is literally “built around your whole life,” Muse is meant to buy back users’ time by taking care of mundane busy work, Meta says. Based on reviews from tech reporters, it’s surprisingly capable and efficient. It can call…

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Have the Saudis realised they can’t beat the Houthis?

Have the Saudis realised they can’t beat the Houthis?

  A dramatic escalation in Yemen has plunged the Middle East into a fresh geopolitical crisis, after a series of deadly Houthi missile attacks on Saudi Arabia’s airports and oil and gas infrastructure. The long running civil war is one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. But why are the Houthis at war with Saudi Arabia? And how does it fit into the wider Middle East conflicts? In this episode of The Fourcast, Krishnan Guru-Murthy is joined by Middle East…

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Trump’s new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, claims she’s a lawyer but there’s no evidence she’s licensed

Trump’s new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, claims she’s a lawyer but there’s no evidence she’s licensed

The Hill reports: President Trump’s new press secretary Katie Zacharia raised eyebrows on Tuesday when she was asked where she passed the bar exam, telling reporters that she did so when she moved to China. Zacharia made the remarks on the White House South Lawn alongside Trump before heading to Alaska with him for a campaign rally. “Where did she pass the bar exam? Which state?” a reporter asked Trump, who turned to Zacharia to ask her, “which state?” “When…

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Why AI must not become a substitute for mathematical research

Why AI must not become a substitute for mathematical research

  Giordano Scarciotti, Imperial College London: AI is solving mathematical problems that have resisted some of the world’s greatest mathematicians for decades. Why are mathematicians concerned instead of celebrating? The answer reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes mathematics valuable. From Euler’s seven bridges of Königsberg to the race to the Moon, I explain why solving a problem is not necessarily the same as advancing science, and why the real value of mathematical research often lies in the discoveries made…

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Drone strikes didn’t take out a Russian bot farm, but we were primed to believe it

Drone strikes didn’t take out a Russian bot farm, but we were primed to believe it

Mother Jones reports: On Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claimed that a Ukrainian bombing strike on Yandex’s data centers, a large Russian technology company, had led to a sudden decrease in bot activity online. “When our strikes reached Yandex’s data centers, it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms,” Zelenskyy declared, speaking at the opening of the Warsaw Security Forum. There was, he added, “less hate, less division, and fewer provocations because there were fewer…

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ICE raid on Rep. Ilhan Omar shows how dangerous two years of flailing Trump could get

ICE raid on Rep. Ilhan Omar shows how dangerous two years of flailing Trump could get

Natasha Lennard writes: In the mode of historic fascist regimes, President Donald Trump’s administration sent federal agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to raid the home of a political opponent, singled out for her race and religion, in a transparent effort to strip her of her citizenship. On Monday, agents with Homeland Security Investigations, ICE’s investigative wing, conducted a search of the Washington, D.C., home of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., with federal officials describing the incursion as part of…

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Admiral McRaven: Public execution is shameless and ignoble

Admiral McRaven: Public execution is shameless and ignoble

William H. McRaven, a retired United States Navy four-star admiral, writes: A 62-grain, 5.56-mm round leaves the barrel of a standard-issue M4 rifle at approximately 2,900 feet per second. When it strikes a human being, the results are violent, traumatic, and unpredictable. If Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has his way, such images will soon be broadcast to the American people. The Pentagon has announced that the execution of Nidal Hasan, the Army officer convicted of killing 13 fellow service members…

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Trump’s actions over the past 72 hours look like an effort to force Kyiv to surrender

Trump’s actions over the past 72 hours look like an effort to force Kyiv to surrender

Anne Applebaum writes: In the past 72 hours, Donald Trump has dropped all pretense, torched a couple decades of American policy, and undermined 18 months of his own diplomacy. He lifted sanctions on the import of Russian diesel fuel, in violation of the letter and spirit of laws that he himself signed. He has threatened to stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine, unless Ukraine agrees not to target Russian refineries, thus demanding that Kyiv give up its most effective weapon while…

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They came to Washington to dismantle government. Now, they’re profiting from it

They came to Washington to dismantle government. Now, they’re profiting from it

The Washington Post reports: Last year, billionaire Elon Musk unleashed a small army of Silicon Valley techies to drain what he called the “swamp” of Washington — wielding the U.S. DOGE Service to slash at a bureaucracy they argued was bloated and corrupt. But today, many of his former DOGE foot soldiers have leveraged their government stints to fuel private-sector ambitions: building companies that tap government largesse or that deploy knowledge they garnered during their brief tenures in Washington. A…

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Musk has spent $366 million to try and avoid facing Congressional investigations

Musk has spent $366 million to try and avoid facing Congressional investigations

Reuters reports: Elon Musk has spent roughly $366 million on the 2026 midterm elections so far, $276 million just since July, trying to help Republicans retain control of ​Congress, even as Democrats’ chances of retaking the US House and Senate ‌have improved. Musk’s largess, which was reported earlier by the New York Times, makes the world’s richest person likely the single-biggest political donor in this year’s races, according to campaign finance records. There is a ​lot at stake for Musk…

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Solar panels that plug into your wall are about to take off

Solar panels that plug into your wall are about to take off

National Geographic reports: On a quiet street in suburban South Salt Lake City, Utah, the stirring of an energy revolution is taking shape. There, outside the spare bedroom of an unassuming, thousand-square-foot midcentury home sit three angled solar panels plugged into a nearby outlet. Unlike the highly technical and expensive hurdles required to install a large rooftop solar system, the setup on Andrew Leon and Victoria Mauro’s lawn is small, portable, and cheap. The unit generates enough electricity to run…

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‘I didn’t want to write about this’: The primatologist who first saw chimps waging civil war

‘I didn’t want to write about this’: The primatologist who first saw chimps waging civil war

The Guardian reports: [John] Mitani [a primatologist from northern California] estimates he has spent 85 months of his life hiking the forests of Ngogo [in Uganda’s Kibale national park], or approximately seven years. What began as a few basic structures and tents has grown into a large – albeit rustic – research camp that has housed the nearly 90 researchers who have worked with the Ngogo project over three decades. The findings that have emerged from Ngogo over the years…

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