Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

A go-kart track is an odd location to launch a tech initiative in the nation’s biggest city. Yet last month there was New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, zipping around the 900-foot oval at Coney Island’s Luna Park before stepping up to a podium to unveil a program called Public Interest Technology (PIT) Crews. Thus the go-kart theme.PIT will consist of five “game-changing” teams that, Mamdani promised, will “raise the bar for what New Yorkers can expect from City Hall.” Working closely with city agencies, these small groups of engineers and designers will strive to change the hidebound and confusing…

NVIDIA Labs has open-sourced NOOA (NVIDIA Object-Oriented Agents), a model-agnostic Python framework for building AI agents. Agent development today is split across prompt templates, tool schemas, callback code, and workflow graphs. NOOA collapses all of it into one Python class. Methods are the actions the model can take. Fields are agent state. Docstrings are prompts. Type annotations are contracts the runtime enforces. A method whose body is … is completed at runtime by an LLM-driven loop, while a method with a normal body stays deterministic Python. Developers and models therefore share one interface, so agent behavior can be tested, traced,…

Regulatory bodies have also failed to keep up with or understand the industry’s rapid advancements. The US has no binding legal framework that would have required a different response from OpenAI, as labs are only beholden to voluntary commitments weighed against commercial pressure, and in cases like these, huge security breaches only serve to make the model look extremely smart and powerful. The US has attempted to create guardrails, but they fail to understand the ecosystem. We can see effects stemming from this lack of understanding in the recent attack: when Hugging Face’s responders needed to analyze what its attacker…

Additionally, the OFAC also sanctioned a network of foreign exchange houses, shell companies and individuals on Friday that it said helped Iran’s shadow banking system move hundreds of millions of dollars, including funds tied to overseas oil sales.“The Iranian regime’s reliance on digital assets and shadow banking networks is further evidence that Economic Fury is working,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement. “Whether in dollars, rials, or crypto, Treasury will hunt down and dismantle the illicit financial networks that keep the regime afloat.”The designations came as the U.S.-Iran war has raised the stakes of Washington’s push to cut…

Researchers used multiple sampling techniques to determine which microorganisms lived inside Ötzi during his lifetime and which arrived after his death. The later microbes could have colonized the body while it remained frozen in the glacier or during more than 30 years of modern conservation. Genetic material recovered from internal tissues included bacteria that were part of Ötzi’s original gut flora. The team also made an unexpected discovery: cold-adapted yeast species that likely came from the glacier and have remained on the mummy into the present day. These organisms may eventually prove useful in industrial processes. The findings were published…

Houthi attacks on Yemen’s Marib province killed at least 10 people Friday, according to a minister and military source, as the rebels escalated strikes on the oil-rich region a day after their deadliest attack in years. The latest violence has raised the spectre of a return to war in the Arabian Peninsula’s poorest country, where a 2022 truce between the Houthis and the Saudi-backed government had largely held before unravelling last month. A Yemeni military source told AFP that Houthi attacks in Marib province killed eight members of government forces and wounded 12 others. Read moreHouthi rebels kill dozens of…

Representative Max Miller, the increasingly embattled Republican from Ohio who was accused of physically abusing his ex-wife and young daughter, continued to resist pressure on Friday to drop his re-election bid as the deadline for him to withdraw neared.Mr. Miller planned to loan his campaign $1 million, according to a person familiar with his thinking who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe campaign strategy, effectively rebuffing calls from powerful Republicans in the state to withdraw from the race.Senator Jon Husted, who faces his own tough re-election battle, broke his silence Thursday by publicly urging Mr. Miller to “step…