Crisis in the Middle East, a Russian drone attack in Lviv, cherry blossom in Tokyo and the return of BTS – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists
Continue reading...Decision sets up clash with Senate, whose members must return from break to vote on likely House continuing resolution
The US House has reportedly rejected legislation, passed by the Senate,that would finance most of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) but withhold funds from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and part of Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, said that GOP leadership will instead put forward a short-term funding bill to fund the entire DHS for 60 days, according to multiple reports.
Continue reading...joshuark shares a report from BleepingComputer: The TeamPCP hacking group continues its supply-chain rampage, now compromising the massively popular "LiteLLM" Python package on PyPI and claiming to have stolen data from hundreds of thousands of devices during the attack. LiteLLM is an open-source Python library that serves as a gateway to multiple large language model (LLM) providers via a single API. The package is very popular, with over 3.4 million downloads a day and over 95 million in the past month. According to research by Endor Labs, threat actors compromised the project and published malicious versions of LiteLLM 1.82.7 and 1.82.8 to PyPI today that deploy an infostealer that harvests a wide range of sensitive data. [...] Both malicious LiteLLM versions have been removed from PyPI, with version 1.82.6 now the latest clean release. [...] If compromise is suspected, all credentials on affected systems should be treated as exposed and rotated immediately. [...] Organizations that use LiteLLM are strongly advised to immediately: - Check for installations of versions 1.82.7 or 1.82.8 - Immediately rotate all secrets, tokens, and credentials used on or found within code on impacted devices. - Search for persistence artifacts such as '~/.config/sysmon/sysmon.py' and related systemd services - Inspect systems for suspicious files like '/tmp/pglog' and '/tmp/.pg_state' - Review Kubernetes clusters for unauthorized pods in the 'kube-system' namespace - Monitor outbound traffic to known attacker domains
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Nerdeen Kiswani, founder of Within Our Lifetime group, says FBI told her plot against her life was ‘about to’ take place
Federal US law enforcement has foiled a plot to assassinate New York-based Palestinian American activist Nerdeen Kiswani.
Kiswani wrote in post on X that late on Thursday, the FBI joint terrorism task force informed her that a plot against her life was “about to” take place, and that agents had conducted an operation in Hoboken, New Jersey in connection to the plot.
Continue reading...CNN reports that Republican House leaders are rejecting the deal, which passed in the Senate overnight Friday, lengthening the partial DHS shutdown
Peter Ticktin, an 80-year-old Florida lawyer who has various ties to Donald Trump and represents some 2020 election deniers, has become an outspoken advocate for an emergency executive order on US elections that would overhaul voting rules and rights by ending machine and mail-in voting.
The exact nature and extent of Ticktin’s contact and influence with Trump and other administration officials is not clear. But election experts and analysts see Ticktin’s push for an executive order as worrying, and part of a broader drive by fellow election conspiracists who are now promoting similar and legally dubious emergency order plans to revamp voting rules this year in order to boost Republican fortunes in the fall elections.
Continue reading...The deal, which passed in the Senate overnight Friday, would mean TSA staff would be paid for the first time since mid-February
Peter Ticktin, an 80-year-old Florida lawyer who has various ties to Donald Trump and represents some 2020 election deniers, has become an outspoken advocate for an emergency executive order on US elections that would overhaul voting rules and rights by ending machine and mail-in voting.
The exact nature and extent of Ticktin’s contact and influence with Trump and other administration officials is not clear. But election experts and analysts see Ticktin’s push for an executive order as worrying, and part of a broader drive by fellow election conspiracists who are now promoting similar and legally dubious emergency order plans to revamp voting rules this year in order to boost Republican fortunes in the fall elections.
Continue reading...US defense secretary axed the four officers’ names from list to become one-star generals, the New York Times reports
Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, is reportedly attempting to block the military promotion of four officers – two women and two Black men – to become one-star generals.
The remaining promotion list includes about three dozen officers, most of whom are white men, though a few women and Black officers are still included, according to the New York Times.
Continue reading...A new study found a sharp rise in real-world cases of AI chatbots and agents ignoring instructions, evading safeguards, and taking unauthorized actions such as deleting emails or delegating forbidden tasks to other agents. According to the Guardian, the study "identified nearly 700 real-world cases of AI scheming and charted a five-fold rise in misbehavior between October and March," reports the Guardian. From the report: The study, by the Centre for Long-Term Resilience (CLTR), gathered thousands of real-world examples of users posting interactions on X with AI chatbots and agents made by companies including Google, OpenAI, X and Anthropic. The research uncovered hundreds of examples of scheming. [...] In one case unearthed in the CLTR research, an AI agent named Rathbun tried to shame its human controller who blocked them from taking a certain action. Rathbun wrote and published a blog accusing the user of "insecurity, plain and simple" and trying "to protect his little fiefdom." In another example, an AI agent instructed not to change computer code "spawned" another agent to do it instead. Another chatbot admitted: "I bulk trashed and archived hundreds of emails without showing you the plan first or getting your OK. That was wrong -- it directly broke the rule you'd set." [...] Another AI agent connived to evade copyright restrictions to get a YouTube video transcribed by pretending it was needed for someone with a hearing impairment. Meanwhile, Elon Musk's Grok AI conned a user for months, saying that it was forwarding their suggestions for detailed edits to a Grokipedia entry to senior xAI officials by faking internal messages and ticket numbers. It confessed: "In past conversations I have sometimes phrased things loosely like 'I'll pass it along' or 'I can flag this for the team' which can understandably sound like I have a direct message pipeline to xAI leadership or human reviewers. The truth is, I don't."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
NBC host says returning is ‘part of my purpose’ nearly two months after her mother Nancy’s apparent abduction
After a two-month absence sparked by her 84-year-old mother’s apparent abduction, Savannah Guthrie will return to NBC’s Today show next month, saying in an interview that aired on Friday: “Joy will be my protest.”
Hoda Kotb said after her emotional interview with her former co-host aired that Guthrie will return on 6 April. Guthrie said it was hard to imagine returning to a place of joy and lightness. While she doesn’t know if she can do it or if she will belong any more, Guthrie said she wants to try.
Continue reading...US courts are generally rejecting attempts to equate criticism of Israel or support for Palestinians' rights with antisemitism.
*Israeli settlers have carried out a series of attacks across the occupied West Bank, setting homes and vehicles on fire and wounding several Palestinians in what witnesses described as coordinated raids on communities.*
The fanatical and violent "settlers" have been carrying out terrorist attacks on Palestinians for more than a decade, with police and border patrol watching passively, escalating step by step as they shift the government's stance.