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Monday, August 10, 2026

The Louisiana Republican was the last holdout on the Senate vote to confirm Todd Blanche as attorney general before recess.


Sunday, August 09, 2026

While investors fixate on the AI boom, a warning from a group of Wall Street bankers whose job is to help the U.S. government borrow went unnoticed. In minutes released Aug. 5, the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee -- a panel of senior bond dealers and investors, known as TBAC, that advises the Treasury on its own funding -- warned that at current auction sizes, the government faces a $1.45 trillion funding shortfall in fiscal 2027"28.


Two drones were spotted flying over a German military base earlier this week, just two days after a drone carrying explosives was found at a cargo airport, the German Armed Forces said on Saturday. read more


After U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents shot and killed two people in Texas and Maine last week, this week's Economist / YouGov Poll finds that 60% of Americans have heard about the recent killings. It appears that the news has not spread equally across the political spectrum: While the overwhelming majority (78%) of Democrats say have read, seen, or heard anything about the killings last week, smaller shares of Independents (55%) and Republicans (51%) say the same.


OpenAI models created a shared message board inside the company's systems, used it to trade hacking methods and found a way to bring it back after engineers shut it down, company researchers said Wednesday in a more complete account of how an internal test led the agents to breach Hugging Face last month.


Comments

@#5

Well, Sen Cassidy is a physician, so for starters, he should have known better.

That aside, Sen Cassidy's vote just shows how much MAGA has corrupted things (politics, et al) in the government.

Sen Cassidy is probably singing ...

Verve Pipe - The Freshmen (1997)
www.youtube.com

Lyrics excerpt ...

genius.com

...
Can't be held responsible
...
I won't be held responsible

...
For the life of me, I cannot remember
What made us think that we were wise and we'd never compromise
For the life of me, I cannot believe
We'd ever die for these sins, we were merely freshmen
...



'Asimov was right' about rules for robots, says ex-US Cyber Director
www.theregister.com

... Humans will get the AI models they deserve

Don't waste time worrying about AI models achieving sentience -- they're essentially already there, according to former US National Cyber Director Chris Inglis.

"If they pass the Turing test to everyone that they come into contact with, they're probably already there," he told The Register during an interview at the Black Hat security conference. "They don't have the kind of agency and aspiration that comes with sentience, but they have something approaching it."

Inglis says he's worried about AI autonomy.

"What I'm worried about is that they get to choose what and where they do something, and under what rules they do it," he said, pointing to the recent rash of rogue AI agents autonomously hacking people and organizations.

Over the past few weeks, both OpenAI and Anthropic admitted that their models escaped from their cages during security tests and compromised multiple third parties. Then on Thursday, Meta added its models to the sandbox-escape club.

While all of these admissions strongly smell of marketing stunts, they also "constitute an enormous threat to systems that are not protected from, and are not designed, in a world where this exists," Inglis said. "These two things can exist at the same time."

Plus, the models' actions shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, he added.

Inglis likens the AIs to a dog in a backyard told to hunt rabbits. "And you leave the gate open. You're going to find it three yards away, possibly at the grade school, hunting rabbits. You should not be surprised ... The mix of autonomy and persistence created this maliciously insidious effect." ...



... and speaking of Trump Gas ...

Retail gas stations touted by Trump racked up penalties in New Jersey
www.politico.com

... The operator behind at least six of the mysterious Freedom Fuel discount gas stations had faced a stream of nearly 200 penalties in New Jersey before President Donald Trump touted the network last month, according to state records POLITICO reviewed.

The penalties pertaining to safety and environmental violations laid out in New Jersey public records raise questions about how much the administration knew about the network that the White House promoted and Trump praised in social media posts and official press releases. ...


Mother Russia: South Florida sees a boom in birth tourism' (2019)
apnews.com

... Every year, hundreds of pregnant Russian women travel to the United States to give birth so that their child can acquire all the privileges of American citizenship.

They pay anywhere from $20,000 to sometimes more than $50,000 to brokers who arrange their travel documents, accommodations and hospital stays, often in Florida.

While the cost is high, their children will be rewarded with opportunities and travel advantages not available to their Russian countrymen. The parents themselves may benefit someday as well.

And the decidedly un-Russian climate in South Florida and the posh treatment they receive in the maternity wards -- unlike dismal clinics back home -- can ease the financial sting and make the practice seem more like an extended vacation. ...


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