While some powerful Russians shun the West, others want to restore ties and embrace friendly Westerners. President Vladimir V. Putin’s annual economic conference illustrates the conflicting impulses.

The Republicans Steve Hilton, who is running for governor, and Spencer Pratt, running for Los Angeles mayor, have shown early strength, but that could fade as more ballots are counted.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Bumblebees can use tools to solve a problem, according to experiments that demonstrate their remarkably advanced cognitive abilities. The bees were given an adapted version of an experiment that, 100 years ago, first demonstrated chimpanzees could work out how to retrieve an out-of-reach banana by stacking boxes. Since then, various other primates, elephants and crows have joined an elite cohort of species known to be capable of this level of insight and spontaneous problem solving. In the latest research, bees were shown to be able to roll a polystyrene ball to a specific location and climb on to it in order to access an artificial flower on a low ceiling. The findings challenge the longstanding assumption that insects operate purely on instinct and mindless trial-and-error learning. "Most people think insects are reflex-based machines," said Dr Olli Loukola, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Oulu, Finland, and senior author. "That they can't have any emotional states or feel pain. Some people don't even realize that they have brains. I hope that these results change the worldview about that." "We are not claiming that bees think like humans," added Loukola. "But our findings show that miniature brains can generate flexible solutions to novel problems in ways we are only beginning to understand." The findings are published in the journal Science.

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The Trump administration’s efforts to tighten the economic noose on Cuba appear to be working, as more international firms announced they would leave the island.

As Xi Jinping visits Pyongyang, he faces an emboldened North Korean dictator, whose alliance with Russia has reduced his dependence on China.

The Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine could be charming, women said in interviews, but some found his actions intimidating and disturbing.

In an interview after The Times reported on his treatment of women he had dated, Graham Platner acknowledged “not exactly acting with the best behavior” after his military service.

Jamie Dimon himself is planning to pitch investors on the offering of Elon Musk’s rocket company, as banks prepare to reap huge fees from the largest I.P.O. ever.

Researchers relied on a newer gene-editing technique that may make it possible to engineer embryos, a prospect that has long alarmed bioethicists.

Eighteen G.O.P. lawmakers broke with their party and joined Democrats to deliver yet another blow to the president’s foreign policy agenda.

Nick Bilton said he had consulted with the program’s remaining correspondents: Lesley Stahl, Jon Wertheim and Bill Whitaker. All three were deliberating whether to stay with the show, two people said.

“After 26 years in power, age is beginning to take its toll,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine wrote of his Russian counterpart, bragging of a recent strike on St. Petersburg.

Anthropic is urging leading AI labs to consider slowing development, warning that frontier models are advancing fast enough that they may soon be able to improve themselves without direct human intervention. The company says a global ability to pause or slow AI development would "likely be a good thing," citing internal data about accelerating model capabilities. From a blog post: Using public benchmarks and previously unreported data from within Anthropic, The Anthropic Institute is showing that AI is already accelerating the development of AI systems. To take just one example: today, Anthropic engineers on average ship 8x as much code per quarter as they did from 2021-2025. The technical trends discussed in this piece suggest that AI systems are going to become much more capable in coming years. These trends have huge implications. AI that can build itself would be a major development in the history of technology -- one that could bring enormous good for the world in science, healthcare, and beyond. But full recursive self-improvement also might increase the risks of humans losing control over AI systems. If systems are capable of fully building their own successors, the ways we secure them, monitor them, and shape their behavior all grow much more important. [...] If it were possible to effectively slow the development of this technology to give ourselves more time to deal with its immense implications, we think that would likely be a good thing. But if a slowdown simply lets the least cautious actors catch up technologically, it could leave everyone less safe. Without a global coordination mechanism, companies and governments will have to make difficult decisions about safety while under competitive and geopolitical pressures. We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology. The Anthropic Institute will conduct research -- in collaboration with many others -- and take actions to help build the systems that a credible slowdown or pause would require. These systems would enable frontier AI developers to verify that others globally have actually stopped or slowed, and that a bad actor could not use the auspices of a coordinated slowdown to jump ahead in secret. If such systems existed, we expect that we would slow down or temporarily pause, if other developers at or near the frontier also did so in a verifiable manner...

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The National Capital Planning Commission received nearly 1,700 comments about President Trump’s plans to build a 250-foot arch in the nation’s capital. Almost all opposed the idea.

The pilot heard a “thump” while landing in Newark, according to a newly released report. The light pole crashed onto a truck.

Also, senators clashed over Trump’s payout fund. Here’s the latest at the end of Thursday.

A new npm supply-chain attack has infected 36 packages with Rust-based infostealer malware called IronWorm. According to BleepingComputer, the malware "targets 86 environment variables (key-value pairs) and 20 credential files that may contain OpenAI, AWS, Anthropic, and npm credentials, vault configuration files, SSH keys, and Exodus cryptocurrency wallet files." From the report: According to researchers at supply-chain and devops company JFrog, IronWorm is written in Rust, hides behind an eBPF kernel rootkit, and communicates with the operator over the Tor network. The Rust-based malware self-propagates by using stolen credentials for publishing on npm; this includes secrets associated with npm's Trusted Publishing workflow. Once it compromises a developer or CI environment, it can publish trojanized versions of packages owned by the victim, which then infect additional developers and CI systems. This behavior is conceptually similar to Shai Hulud, which had its code published on GitHub recently. Although JFrog researchers did not find a clear connection between IronWorm and Shai Hulud, they observed the same commit names in both supply-chain attacks. This opens the possibility that the new malware is an evolution of TeamPCP's payload, since IronWorm appears to be "a custom, carefully built implant from an operation with its own infrastructure." [...] The company provides a list of all impacted package names and their versions in the report and recommends that developers upgrade to fixed releases, rotate their keys, and enable two-factor authentication (2FA) for all accounts. At the same time, Endor Labs and StepSecurity have spotted a very similar but distinct attack involving a JavaScript-based malware named binding.gyp, performing registry poisoning and GitHub Actions infection, unfolding during the same time-frame.

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President Trump has pursued fame his entire adult life. Now in his second term in the White House, he is finding how little power he has to force cultural figures to fall in line.

The president is claiming without evidence that the lengthy counting process in California, which could help determine control of Congress, means Democrats are stealing the election.

The president announced a new project that would connect the memorial to the Potomac River. He isn’t sure if he wants it to be named after himself.