“From the oceanic depths of the Atlantic to the critically melting ice caps of the Arctic, the dedication and skills of the United States Armed Forces alongside its allies are fundamental to NATO, committed to mutual defense, safeguarding our populations and interests, ensuring the safety of North Americans and Europeans from our shared threats,” he stated.
“The DOJ will struggle to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that James Comey intended to threaten or harm President Trump,” stated Gurulé, now a professor at Notre Dame Law School, in a statement to the BBC. “The indictment serves as a transparent effort to intimidate one of the President’s perceived political adversaries.”
When I was young and a bit wayward, I spent a summer working as a waiter at Shoney’s. I wouldn’t recommend the experience. Still, it taught me two useful lessons: 1) How not to sink into a puddle of embarrassment while parading around the dining room with other servers and singing a birthday tune that began, “Happy, happy birthday, we’re so glad you came”; and 2) That when the surly line cooks ran out of chicken fried steak they’d shout “86 the chicken fried steak!” through the pass.
In restaurant slang, to “86” something means it’s gone, sold out, finished, off the menu — essentially unavailable. That’s the only meaning I’ve encountered in my life.
However, Wikipedia, which of course has an entry on the term, notes two additional senses. “86” can be used for patrons a restaurant refuses to serve, and some slang dictionaries even list it as a term for murder.
That brings us to former FBI director James Comey, Instagram, and a photograph of seashells.
In 2025, Comey shared on Instagram a photo of shells arranged to form two numbers: “86 47.”
James Comey’s seashell photo.
James Comey’s seashell photo.
Trump, the 47th president, has long resented Comey, dating to Comey’s inquiry into Trump’s alleged Russian ties. Trump famously dismissed Comey in 2017—and, to add insult, dismissed his prosecutor daughter in 2025.
For years Trump has openly sought to use federal power to make Comey’s life harder, and officials in his second term have been willing to go along.
Luckily for Comey, they’ve been remarkably inept. After a series of blunders, the administration’s first indictment of Comey was thrown out in Virginia—a defeat so significant it also cost Trump’s interim U.S. attorney for Virginia his job.
These bacteria possess an extensive repertoire of molecular weapons, including multiple toxins, that allow them to commandeer cells, siphon nutrients, break down structural proteins, erode tissue linings, make blood vessels more permeable, drive damaging inflammation, blunt immune defenses, and broadly devastate their hosts.
The overall mortality for V. vulnificus infections is roughly 35 percent. For anyone who is immunocompromised or has liver disease, death rates climb to about 50–60 percent. Likewise, patients who develop sepsis—a life‑threatening systemic response to infection—face roughly a 50 percent mortality. In situations like the one described, if antibiotics or surgical removal of necrotic tissue are delayed, the fatality rate rises to 100 percent.
The man in this case survived, but his right leg was so badly damaged by the time he reached the hospital that he required an above‑knee amputation. His forearm needed extensive skin grafting taken from other parts of his body. After a course of antibiotics and six months of recovery, doctors reported he had healed well.
The case underscored that the danger from V. vulnificus is growing with climate change, and medical experts view its increasing presence as a pressing public health concern. Warming waters, a widening geographic range, and rising antibiotic resistance are boosting the risks. Between 1998 and 2018, U.S. cases of V. vulnificus increased eightfold, spreading into areas where the bacterium was once uncommon, including Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine.
“The abundance and geographic range of V. vulnificus are expected to expand owing to climate‑related factors, including higher water temperatures, storm surges, salinity shifts, and algal blooms,” the man’s doctors wrote.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends preventing a Vibrio infection by eating only thoroughly cooked seafood and washing your hands after handling raw seafood. If you have an open wound, avoid entering brackish water or at minimum keep it tightly covered. If you are wounded in brackish water or an existing wound is exposed, wash it with soap and clean, running water.
The confidential agreement reportedly does not grant Google the power to prohibit how the government utilizes its AI models.
The confidential agreement reportedly does not grant Google the power to prohibit how the government utilizes its AI models.
Google has entered into a classified agreement permitting the US Department of Defense to deploy its AI models for “any lawful government purpose,” The Information reports. The pact was disclosed shortly after Google staff requested CEO Sundar Pichai prevent the Pentagon from employing its AI amid apprehensions that it could be utilized in “inhumane or extremely detrimental ways.”
If the agreement is validated, it would align Google with OpenAI and xAI, which have also established classified AI arrangements with the US government. Anthropic was additionally on that list until it was blacklisted by the Pentagon for declining the Department of Defense’s requests to eliminate weapon and surveillance-related safeguards from its AI systems.
Citing a single unnamed source “familiar with the situation,” The Information states that the deal asserts that both parties have concurred that the search giant’s AI systems should not be employed for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weaponry “without suitable human supervision and control.” However, the contract also indicates it does not grant Google “any authority to oversee or deny lawful governmental operational choices,” implying that the agreed limits are more of a casual agreement than enforceable commitments.
In a statement to Reuters, a Google representative expressed that the firm maintains the view that AI should not be utilized for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weaponry without proper human oversight. “We consider that providing API access to our commercial models, including on Google infrastructure, with industry-standard practices and terms, signifies a responsible approach to supporting national security,” Google informed the outlet.
Following the events of Mythos, AI-enhanced hobbyist hackers are poised to launch their attacks.
In August of last year, top cybersecurity teams gathered in Las Vegas to showcase their AI-driven bug detection technologies at DARPA’s Artificial Intelligence Cyber Challenge (AIxCC). These tools analyzed 54 million lines of actual coding that DARPA had imbued with fabricated flaws. The teams managed to uncover most of the synthetic bugs, but their automated systems exceeded expectations — they discovered more than a dozen flaws that DARPA had not even introduced.
Before the seismic security shift brought on by Anthropic’s latest model, Claude Mythos — which appears to uncover vulnerabilities in every software it examines — there was already a trend of automated systems becoming adept at pinpointing coding issues. Concerns are intensifying that AI might not only identify these issues but could also be leveraged to exploit them, giving every individual around the globe access to hacking potential.
This situation is far from hypothetical. For years, this kind of low-skill hacker, termed a script kiddie, has created chaos by executing scripts obtained from the web or copied from exploit toolkits. They lacked the understanding or technical skill to generate these scripts on their own. Nevertheless, they managed to deface websites and spread malware.
The current landscape marks a significant escalation, empowering individuals without technical backgrounds to utilize AI to magnify their abilities in ways that were previously unachievable with basic scripts. The implications are likely to be significantly broader.
“A tidal wave is approaching. We can all see it,” stated Dan Guido, CEO and co-founder of cybersecurity firm Trail of Bits, a runner-up in the challenge. “Will you surrender or will you take action?”
Beyond Project Glasswing, Anthropic is actively working to thwart the misuse of its software by those with malicious intent. A week after unveiling Mythos, the firm introduced Claude Opus 4.7, which for the first time integrated safeguards designed to prevent harmful cybersecurity inquiries. (Security experts wishing to employ the model defensively can apply to the company’s Cyber Verification Program.)
The launch of Mythos sent ripples through the industry, but signs of AI’s cybersecurity capabilities were evident before this announcement. In June 2025, the autonomous offensive security platform XBOW surpassed human hackers to lead the leaderboard on HackerOne, a bug bounty platform, highlighting significant advancements in AI’s ability to detect vulnerabilities.
By the time AIxCC took place, “there were already 10 to 20 distinct bug-detecting systems capable of identifying vastly more bugs than we could possibly address,” Guido remarked. “This is not a fresh challenge.”
AI excels at recognizing patterns, and it’s becoming progressively simpler for individuals to uncover variations of both known and unknown bugs. Furthermore, crafting exploits is now more manageable.
“With AI tools and minimal to no human intervention, you can discover a zero-day vulnerability in widely utilized software,” said Tim Becker, senior security researcher at Theori, also a finalist in the contest.
The anxiety is evident across the sector, with advancements in models — along with enhanced comprehension of their functions — occurring at breakneck speed.
Open-weight models, or those with publicly accessible trained parameters (known as weights), also present a risk. In fact, sophisticated threat actors are more inclined to run their deployments privately to keep the exploits concealed from Anthropic or OpenAI servers, Becker remarked, as Anthropic may retain data to prevent abuse. The industry is bracing for the potential fallout of what may follow. Other model creators might not exercise the same caution as Anthropic, potentially making their robust new tools readily available to the public.
“Regardless of Mythos, this is inevitable,” Guido asserts.
Mythos signifies an advancement in exploit creation, yet current models possess capabilities as well. Security researchers are already employing more readily available models to report vulnerabilities to companies before they can be exploited externally. This presents a dual risk of malicious actors deploying them for harmful purposes, like engineering exploits for repressive regimes or compromising sensitive data.
Experts in the field anticipate that advancements in AI security will result in a surge of new exploits. Malicious actors could direct AI to identify bugs in niche software that previously received little attention for exploitation.
“Now, because the effort required is minimal, you can target lower-tier items. You can develop exploits for software used by just one company. You can craft exploits for software that exists in a unique configuration utilized by a single corporation. And you can accomplish this dynamically. For instance, during a breach in a hospital, if there’s a barrier between you and your objective, you can simply direct an LLM to that barrier and command, ‘Identify a flaw here,’ and it will iterate until successful. It will uncover a vulnerability, spot a configuration, and execute an exploit for a weakness that has never been discovered before, all with minimal input from the user… the hacker… the script kiddie,” remarked Guido.
This escalates the abilities of script kiddies, he explains, as they can act spontaneously without needing to memorize weaknesses in various UNIX utilities, instead relying on the pretraining embedded within the tool they utilize. They’ll be capable of rapidly cycling through exploits aimed at targeting vulnerabilities at machine speed, something beyond human capacity — even beyond that of a script kiddie.
Determining the exact extent to which this enhances attacker abilities is challenging, although there clearly appears to be a connection. Security researchers can assist in understanding the magnitude of bugs being discovered.
Before Becker began focusing on automatic bug discovery through AI, he specialized in vulnerability research, locating zero-days and notifying maintainers. He stated that it previously took him weeks or even months to identify a high-impact vulnerability in a new codebase, whereas now it requires mere hours.
“I simply feed the code into our AI bug-detection tool, and within hours, I receive a report containing several potential vulnerabilities, most of which end up being valid issues,” he claimed. “The entry barrier to diving into a new million-line codebase and spotting a bug is far lower than it used to be.”
Each rollout of a new automated tool has triggered a wave of concern regarding potential exploitation, regardless of whether these tools are text-to-image generators or open-source systems like the exploit development and delivery framework Metasploit. The anxiety dates back to 1995, when a free software vulnerability scanner named SATAN (an acronym for Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks) was introduced.
Often, automated tools do not bring about the level of chaos that had been anticipated or foretold, due to preventive measures, low uptake rates among attackers, or other variables.
Joshua Saxe, CTO and co-founder of Security Superintelligence Labs, noted in a blog post that exploits themselves do not initiate cyberattacks, and that the adoption of AI vulnerability research tools has been gradual.
“There seems to be an unspoken understanding that once a new adversarial tool becomes accessible… we will instantaneously witness illicit behavior with it. It’s a mindset that overlooks the need to consider what humans are genuinely doing,” he told The Verge.
Saxe highlights that resistance may arise among various factions of attackers adopting these tools into their existing workflows and organizational cultures. “There’s a substantial human and organizational facet here,” he remarked.
“It’s possible certain attacker groups will swiftly embrace these new tools, or the uptake may be rather sluggish.” Some might continue breaching networks through phishing or leveraging exploits they already possess, while others could begin forming new exploits via these tools.
While the pace of adoption is uncertain, companies can take proactive measures to brace for the impending wave of vulnerability reports.
Katie Moussouris, founder and CEO of Luta Security, coined the term “Vulnapalooza” in a blog entry featuring a concert poster and a festival survival guide for security teams, emphasizing this moment as critical for organizations to bolster their vulnerabilities. Their recommendations mirror conventional best practices: segmentation, refining identity and access management, employing memory-safe code, and implementing phishing-resistant authentication alongside up-to-date software.
The Cloud Security Alliance published a rapid strategy briefing focused on formulating a “Mythos-ready” security strategy that encapsulates several of these concepts. The report highlighted the necessity of not only addressing vulnerabilities but also determining which ones to prioritize. However, the urgency to keep pace with machine-speed threats is novel, and the volume of bug reports is already surging, necessitating preparation for an uptick in incidents and their swift containment and mitigation.
Moussouris points out that many individuals in cybersecurity roles have faced layoffs due to AI’s efficiencies, even though these efficiencies are precisely the reason human oversight becomes increasingly essential. Organizations will require human threat hunters, threat intelligence analysts, and incident responders to handle the influx of new exploits. Additionally, they’ll need people to determine which patches demand prioritization and execution.
“We lack an equivalent AI-based defense system to automate all of these functions, and I believe we will need substantial staffing increases,” she articulated. Organizations must also construct secure software and secure network architecture to avoid falling into a ceaseless cycle of patching. “More secure software must be developed initially. We cannot simply respond to incidents as a route to resilience.”
Organizations unable to expand their hiring could at least streamline their vendor onboarding procedures to facilitate quicker engagement of personnel or services when necessary. “Being ensnared in a lengthy vendor procurement process while under siege is a situation to avoid,” Moussouris advised.
Despite widespread concerns about vulnerabilities, Moussouris contends that the anticipated “vulnpocalypse” may actually manifest as a “patchpocalypse.”
“The model has already uncovered thousands of vulnerabilities, and the tsunami of patches that will arise from this collaborative effort will present significant challenges,” she noted.
Organizations that delay patching their systems might face unwelcome surprises. Prolonged inaction increases the risk of active attacks targeting vulnerabilities that AI has identified, potentially employing exploits crafted by the models themselves.
“The timeframe from when a vulnerability is disclosed to when exploit code becomes available has effectively shrunk to nearly zero, representing a significant adjustment that individuals must incorporate into their risk assessments and timelines for action,” she elucidated.
There is a chance to leverage AI to accelerate the remediation or mitigation processes. Becker mentioned that Theori is developing a commercial tool named Xint, which has been operational on open-source codebases, manually reporting critical findings to maintainers and providing detailed reports with remediation guidance at its own expense, serving both as a community defense initiative and to showcase the tool’s capabilities. The current version of Xint was able to identify all the bugs Mythos did while analyzing the same codebases. It also detected 12 additional zero-day vulnerabilities absent from Anthropic’s announcement.
However, addressing these bugs won’t be as swift as discovering them, as it necessitates engineers with extensive familiarity with the codebase to ascertain if the patches represent the optimal solutions or if they could compromise maintainability or clarity in the future. Occasionally, a patch may offer a solution but not the most effective one, thus requiring human time and effort to finalize the remedies.
The considerable increase in reported bugs can lead to a lengthy queue of items to be patched, particularly for open-source maintainers, who may find it challenging to manage the influx.
While not every bug holds value for an attacker, sifting through the pile to identify which ones warrant immediate attention can be nearly as challenging as the fixes themselves.
“Much of the prioritization must be contextual,” Moussouris remarked. For instance, a highly adverse bug existing internally that would be difficult for an outsider to access may rank lower in urgency than a less critical bug that is visible on the organization’s perimeter.
In addition to the prioritization of bugs, organizations must decide when to implement patches that might limit functionality and potentially induce downtime, and when it might be prudent to postpone. The fewer security measures they have in place, the more time they will require for patching.
Simply issuing a patch makes it easier for attackers to reverse-engineer the solution and exploit vulnerabilities they may not have previously identified in unpatched devices. This necessitates that consumers adjust to frequent updates of their software as the volume of critical security fixes escalates significantly. Likewise, organizations should invest in secure architectures to minimize the number of patches they need to oversee initially.
However, as Moussouris encapsulates it, there’s no need for despair. “This doesn’t have to be viewed as the worst possible scenario,” she advised The Verge. “You can approach this as a chance to fortify defenses and secure funding to address issues that have been deferred.”
Regardless of the attitude organizations adopt, they must be ready. The stakes are heightened, and even script kiddies now have substantially more potential to discover and exploit vulnerabilities. Companies require a robust strategy to contend with the emerging threat of AI-facilitated assaults.
“The year 2026 is pivotal; it’s the year to either thrive or fail,” warned Guido. Organizations need to safeguard their systems immediately while they still have an opportunity to proactively manage risks. “If they fail to act, we may reach the end of 2026 amidst chaos.”
United Parcel Service announced its first-quarter earnings on Tuesday, exceeding expectations on both revenue and profits.
Shares of the logistics company fell approximately 3% during premarket trading.
The following details showcase the company’s performance in the first quarter, compared to Wall Street’s forecasts, according to analyst surveys by LSEG:
For the quarter ending March 31, UPS recorded a net income of $864 million, translating to $1.02 per share, down from $1.19 billion or $1.40 per share the previous year. After adjusting for extraordinary items, the firm reported a profit of $906 million, or $1.07 per share.
“The first quarter of 2026 represented a pivotal shift for UPS where we needed to flawlessly implement several key strategic initiatives, and we did,” stated CEO Carol Tomé. “Now that we have that behind us, we anticipate a return to revenue growth and profit improvements, alongside expanded operating margins in the second quarter of this year.”
For its guidance for the full year 2026, the firm reaffirmed its overall revenue projection at $89.7 billion and non-GAAP adjusted operating margin of 9.6%.
Within its domestic sector, UPS indicated a revenue drop of 2.3%, mainly attributed to a predicted decline in volume.
UPS is undergoing a transformation plan and boosting automation within its operations. In the first quarter, the company reported achieving $600 million in savings through its network efficiency plan, with the goal of reaching $3 billion in annual savings by 2026.
Company leaders will conduct a conference call at 8:30 a.m. ET.
DETROIT — General Motors has updated its 2026 forecast after significantly exceeding Wall Street’s initial earnings forecasts for the first quarter, thanks to approximately $500 million from the U.S. Supreme Court ruling to cancel and refund specific tariffs imposed under President Donald Trump’s administration.
The company’s performance in the first quarter, contrasted with average projections from LSEG, is as follows:
The automaker has yet to receive IEEPA reimbursements, but plans to and chose to account for it during the first quarter.
The Detroit-based manufacturer revised its 2026 forecast to reflect adjusted earnings before interest and taxes ranging from $13.5 billion to $15.5 billion, or $11.50 to $13.50 per share, an increase of $500 million, or 50 cents per share, from prior estimates; net income attributable to shareholders between $9.9 billion and $11.4 billion, up from $10.3 billion to $11.7 billion; and automotive operating cash flow projected between $16.8 billion and $20.8 billion, raised from $19 billion to $23 billion.
Excluding the tariff adjustment, the company’s adjusted earnings in the first quarter would still have exceeded expectations and marked an increase of about 7.5% from a year prior. GM CEO Mary Barra noted in a letter to shareholders that this quarter exceeded the company’s forecasts.
GM’s first-quarter results for 2025 showed revenues of $44.02 billion, net income attributable to shareholders of $2.78 billion, and adjusted earnings before interest and taxes of $3.49 billion.
Erika Kirk, the spouse of the conservative figure Charlie Kirk, who was tragically shot and killed last September, was in a state of distress. Congressman Steve Scalise, the majority leader in the House of Representatives who endured life-threatening injuries during a shooting at a baseball rehearsal with Republican colleagues in 2017, was escorted away by security personnel.
At this point, the earliest Artemis III now appears to be pushed to late 2027.
“Both vendors, SpaceX and Blue Origin, have provided responses indicating they can support a late‑2027 rendezvous, docking, and an interoperability test of their landers ahead of a landing attempt in 2028,” Isaacman said Monday.
Each company holds multibillion‑dollar agreements to design and deliver human‑rated landers to NASA for Artemis flights. Both platforms will need on‑orbit refueling to travel to the Moon, a complexity not required for missions confined to Earth orbit.
“Taxpayers are making a substantial investment in the Human Landing System (HLS) capabilities of both SpaceX and Blue Origin,” Isaacman testified to the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees NASA’s budget. “I’d also emphasize that both firms are investing significantly more of their own resources as well.”
Starship and Blue Moon are much larger than the Apollo lunar lander and could eventually be refueled at the Moon to carry out repeated trips between the surface and orbiting crew and cargo vessels.
“That capability enables not just a return to the Moon, but the actual construction of a lunar base, delivering large amounts of mass to the surface affordably and at scale, along with all the other benefits of a reusable rocket,” Isaacman said. “We’re very thankful for that.”
Preparing Starship and Blue Moon for crewed missions presents major hurdles. On Apollo 9, two astronauts flew the lunar module on a test sortie, separating from the command module with the third crewmember for over six hours before docking again in low Earth orbit. To perform a comparable test on Artemis III, Starship or Blue Moon would need an advanced independent life‑support system, human‑rated engines, a proper cockpit and flight controls, and a docking interface. SpaceX and Blue Origin have disclosed few specifics about the status of those systems in development and production.
Credit:
NASA/SpaceX
An artist’s depiction of NASA’s Orion docked to SpaceX’s Starship lunar lander near the Moon.
Credit:
NASA/SpaceX
NASA could opt for a scaled‑back Artemis III that includes a rendezvous and docking but omits an independent crewed flight of the lunar lander. Agency leaders must weigh those choices in the coming months, guided by how rapidly and successfully SpaceX advances Starship Version 3 flights and by Blue Origin’s planned uncrewed Blue Moon cargo landing near the Moon’s south pole.
