Japan Raises Interest Rates to 31-Year High Under U.S. Pressure

NY Times - Thu, 09/17/2026 - 23:15
The Bank of Japan’s widely expected move followed an unusual campaign by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent for tighter monetary policy.

Trump Moves Ahead With F-35 Jet Sales to Saudi Arabia Despite Intelligence Concerns

NY Times - Thu, 09/17/2026 - 22:32
U.S. intelligence agencies have warned in internal reports that China could acquire or steal U.S. warplane technology if F-35 jets are sent to Saudi Arabia.

Blanche’s Political Campaigning Breaks an Ethical Norm Going Back to Watergate

NY Times - Thu, 09/17/2026 - 22:06
The attorney general’s campaign politicking for Republicans adds to the degradation of post-Watergate values at the Justice Department.

RFK Jr. Assures Vaccine Skeptics They Have a ‘Friend at the White House’

NY Times - Thu, 09/17/2026 - 21:35
The health secretary spoke at a conference featuring misinformation about vaccines, including a claim that the success of the polio vaccines was a “fraud.”

Former Institute of Peace Workers Warn Trump May Push to Engrave Name on Building

NY Times - Thu, 09/17/2026 - 21:26
As part of a lawsuit, the workers have asked a federal court to stop any plans to engrave the building with President Trump’s name.

Microsoft and OpenAI Workers Worry About ‘Largest Theft of Labor’ in History

NY Times - Thu, 09/17/2026 - 21:12
Newly unsealed court documents showed concern within Microsoft and OpenAI over the use of millions of news articles to develop A.I. systems.

Ex-Google DeepMind Researcher Also Warns AI Could 'Kill All Humans'. But Meta's Zuckerberg Believes Safety is Up to Each AI Company

SlashDot - Thu, 09/17/2026 - 21:04
Reuters reports that a former Google DeepMind employee "became the latest AI researcher to warn that the technology could 'kill all humans', saying time could be running out to avoid the outcome: Public alarm about the potential danger posed by AI is growing, after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon said last week he had resigned, in part because the "people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade." Anthropic scientist Evan Hubinger then responded to Coxon's comments, saying he was correct and that he believed there was a greater than 10% chance that AI could kill all humans within the next decade. "I recently resigned from Google DeepMind, where I worked on AGI safety and alignment research," Bilal Chughtai wrote on X. "I earnestly believe that AI has the potential to kill us all, and that we might be running out of time to avoid this outcome." Chughtai, who co-authored research papers while at Google DeepMind, worked there as a research engineer and left the company in July 2026, according to his LinkedIn profile. Meanwhile, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg "said it's up to each AI company to make sure its technology is safe," reports the Associated Press, "distancing himself from calls by rival companies for a coordinated slowdown in the development of advanced artificial intelligence. AI companies are already motivated to develop their models in a safe way and face "significant liability" to prevent them from causing harm, Zuckerberg said. "Every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely, and the ability to take its own actions to ensure that happens," he wrote on X... Zuckerberg said Meta delayed releasing its Muse AI agent for several months to ensure its safety and security. "We didn't call for everyone else to do this before we would," he said. Companies should prioritize building safe AI models instead of systems that can automatically improve themselves, a function known as recursive self-improvement, Zuckerberg wrote. "Committing the significant majority of compute towards serving people rather than racing towards recursive self-improvement is one of the best ways to ensure we develop this technology safely." But Zuckerberg also agreed that engaging independent evaluators and advisors "is industry best practice," adding that Meta Superintelligence Labs "already does this today in several areas because it helps produce better work... "I believe the key to building a positive future for everyone is maintaining the right balance of power. This is within our power to do."

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G.O.P. Representative Breaks With Trump in Ad Criticizing the Immigration Crackdown

NY Times - Thu, 09/17/2026 - 21:02
Representative María Elvira Salazar, a three-term representative from Miami, won re-election by 20 percentage points in 2024. Her ad suggests worry among some Republicans about their standing with Hispanic voters.

S.U.V. Driver Charged With Murder in Los Angeles Bus Crash

NY Times - Thu, 09/17/2026 - 20:51
Prosecutors said the driver was impaired by drugs and ran a red light before ramming a city bus on Tuesday. Two people died. Compounding the tragedy, a news helicopter also crashed.

Montana Ballot Measure Would Strike at Political ‘Dark Money’

NY Times - Thu, 09/17/2026 - 20:25
A measure aimed at stemming the tide of corporate money in politics will be on the November ballot. Opponents say it violates a high court ruling.

Trump Wants Putin to End the War. He May Offer Russia Business Deals First.

NY Times - Thu, 09/17/2026 - 19:20
A new sanctions bill is meant to pressure President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to end the war in Ukraine. But President Trump is doubling down on a different approach: offering enticements to Russia.

Yemen War Intensifies as Houthi Militia Advances on Marib

NY Times - Thu, 09/17/2026 - 18:44
Clashes between Iranian-backed Houthi fighters and Saudi-backed government forces have been reported near oil-rich Marib Province.

For a Border Tribe, Trump’s Wall Is a Betrayal: ‘They Want to Erase Us’

NY Times - Thu, 09/17/2026 - 16:54
An escalating confrontation on Native land southwest of Tucson threatens to upend decades of uneasy cooperation between the Tohono O’odham Nation and the United States.

Iran Strikes On Amazon Data Centers Caused Permanent Loss of Customer Data

SlashDot - Thu, 09/17/2026 - 16:34
Ars Technica reports: Half a year after Iranian drone strikes knocked out multiple Amazon data centers, the US tech company has acknowledged the permanent loss of some customer data that was hosted in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. Amazon Web Services was "unable to restore access to the resources and data" hosted in some of the war-damaged data centers, according to an AWS dashboard update posted on September 15. The development was first reported by Reuters and suggests that the Iranian strikes inflicted catastrophic damage on the data centers. Customer data was irretrievably lost in one of three AWS availability zones in the United Arab Emirates region, specifically the mec1-az2 availability zone. Each availability zone is serviced by one or more Amazon data centers. The company is still working on "recovering regional resources" and restoring resources hosted in the other two availability zones in the United Arab Emirates... But the destruction was apparently even more widespread for the data centers in the Bahrain region, because Amazon said it was unable to restore access to resources and data across all three availability zones there. "The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand," the AWS update said. The company had already suspended customer billing in the affected AWS regions in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates and has spent the past six months attempting to restore normal operations... [When the war began] AWS immediately urged customers to migrate resources to other cloud regions and use remote backups to restore any "inaccessible resources." The cloud service also reportedly issued $150 million in customer credits following the initial Iranian strikes in March.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Public Charge Rule: How Trump’s Green Card Policy Could Affect Immigrant Families

NY Times - Thu, 09/17/2026 - 15:39
The policy, set to take effect Friday, would give immigration officers broader authority to deny permanent residency to people using public benefits.

Share the Times Pages You Couldn’t Throw Away

NY Times - Thu, 09/17/2026 - 15:27
The New York Times has been publishing for 175 years. Some of that history may be sitting in a shoe box under your bed.

Trump Air Force One Photos Fuel Kennedy Center Demolition Speculation

NY Times - Thu, 09/17/2026 - 15:10
Images captured through the windows of Air Force One showed President Trump reviewing a poster with the title “Kennedy Center DEMOLISHED.”

The Face of London in the 1960s Is Living Her Best Life

NY Times - Thu, 09/17/2026 - 13:35
The face of London in the 1960s is living her best life at the age of 77.

Watching Bigots Erupt

NY Times - Thu, 09/17/2026 - 12:55
This is what I see when I look at the picture Bo French hates.

Hackers Stole Flock's Camera Software, Revealing How the Company Tracks Cars and People

SlashDot - Thu, 09/17/2026 - 12:04
"Hackers ripped down a Flock camera above a roadway, made a near-complete copy of the data stored inside it, and shared the files with 404 Media and WIRED," according to an article published on both sites. Though Flock has described its system as protected by on-device encryption, "The hackers were able to copy the camera's storage and recover an encryption key stored on the device, which unlocked videos of thousands of vehicle detections." The hackers shared the material with 404 Media and the transparency nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets, which shared the data with WIRED. 404 Media and WIRED then analyzed those files as part of a joint investigation... [T]he joint analysis of the recovered data shows that software running on the device explicitly detects people as well as vehicles, license plates, and bicycles. The camera can produce dozens of images of a single passing vehicle and, according to several weeks of recovered logs, generated more than a million images. Its computer-vision software also sometimes isolated bumper stickers and other graphics, including, in one case, an American flag patch on a motorcyclist's saddlebag... According to our analysis, the camera's logs recorded about 21 days of activity across several periods. During those windows, the device photographed roughly 50,200 vehicles and generated about 1.6 million images. On a typical day, it logged around 3,300 vehicles, with a high of 4,454... The software running on the camera explicitly detects people, something which is typically overlooked in discussions around Flock cameras. When it spots a person, it records where they appear in the image and how confident it is in the detection. It was a collective calling itself stegan0gram that breached the cameras, according to the interview they did with Wired and 404 Media. "Why just destroy them when we can reverse engineer them and find the secrets of those spying on us?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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