Government
Britain has experienced its first official 'MEGA FIRE' - and scientists warn the devastating blazes could soon become the norm
Nancy Pelosi explodes at reporter as she's escorted down Capitol Building steps Trump threatens'land strikes' on Venezuela as CIA begins covert operations in Latin American country and Maduro declares'No to coups' She's the dancer caught'going at it' in bed with Britney Spears. Bella Hadid's health battle takes dark turn: Loved ones reveal hellish new details about model... as ominous texts emerge Diane Keaton's cause of death revealed just days after actress' passing at 79 as her family pens emotional message to fans Emily Ratajkowski fans rejoice as she makes Victoria's Secret show debut at age 34 Murderer's final words and hearty last meal as he's executed after 30 years on death row Nepo babies dare to bare! Celebrity offspring leave nothing to imagination as they dominate Victoria's Secret show... what would their parents say? Victoria's Secret show 2025: Bella Hadid rules the runway after her health woes, Jasmine Tookes opens the show at nine months pregnant and Emily Ratajkowski makes her debut aged 34 as legendary Angels and nepo babies unite after failed woke rebrand Popular food can be used to fight resistant viruses ... and it costs just pennies Disney superfan, 31, vanishes from her Midwest home months after announcing pregnancy... then horrific discovery is made at Walt Disney World Chilling new footage shows knifeman on night he'stabbed Ukrainian refugee to death' on a train in murder that shook America Britney Spears unleashes on ex Kevin Federline AND her SONS - accusing him of'gaslighting' and claiming she's seen one boy for just 45 minutes in five years Jailed Diddy's harsh reality check as very unglamorous conditions rapper has to abide by after prison revealed Britain has experienced its first official'MEGA FIRE' - and scientists warn the devastating blazes could soon become the norm READ MORE: Scientists warn that'FIREWAVES' will devastate UK cities Britain has experienced its first official'mega fire' - and scientists warn the devastating blazes could soon become the norm. Back in June, the Carrbridge and Dava Moor in the Scottish Highlands was devastated by the worst wildfire in living memory. The blaze burned over 11,000 hectares (42.5 square miles) of forest and peatland, killing thousands of animals in its path.
L.A. County gets a new tool to find and save vulnerable people with cognitive disabilities
Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. L.A. County gets a new tool to find and save vulnerable people with cognitive disabilities Jordan Wall, 27, of Chatsworth, -- an athlete, actor and global messenger for the Special Olympics -- wears her new GPS watch from the group L.A. Found on Oct. 15, 2025. The county program L.A. Found offers free tracking devices to residents with cognitive disabilities who are at risk of wandering away from home. Since launching seven years ago, more than 1,800 people have received devices through the program, with 29 successfully located after going missing. Janet Rivera cares for both her 79-year-old mother, who has dementia, and her 25-year-old son, who has a genetic condition called Fragile X syndrome.
The race to make the perfect baby is creating an ethical mess
A new field of science claims to be able to predict aesthetic traits, intelligence, and even moral character in embryos. Is this the next step in human evolution or something more dangerous? Consider, if you will, the translucent blob in the eye of a microscope: a human blastocyst, the biological specimen that emerges just five days or so after a fateful encounter between egg and sperm. This bundle of cells, about the size of a grain of sand pulled from a powdery white Caribbean beach, contains the coiled potential of a future life: 46 chromosomes, thousands of genes, and roughly six billion base pairs of DNA--an instruction manual to assemble a one-of-a-kind human. Now imagine a laser pulse snipping a hole in the blastocyst's outermost shell so a handful of cells can be suctioned up by a microscopic pipette. This is the moment, thanks to advances in genetic sequencing technology, when it becomes possible to read virtually that entire instruction manual. An emerging field of science seeks to use the analysis pulled from that procedure to predict what kind of a person that embryo might become. Some parents turn to these tests to avoid passing on devastating genetic disorders that run in their families. A much smaller group, driven by dreams of Ivy League diplomas or attractive, well-behaved offspring, are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars to optimize for intelligence, appearance, and personality. Some of the most eager early boosters of this technology are members of the Silicon Valley elite, including tech billionaires like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong. Embryo selection is less like a build-a-baby workshop and more akin to a store where parents can shop for their future children from several available models--complete with stat cards. But customers of the companies emerging to provide it to the public may not be getting what they're paying for. Genetics experts have been highlighting the potential deficiencies of this testing for years.
Japan's government asks OpenAI to seek permission amid Sora 2 copyright concerns
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NATO and EU scramble to boost drone defenses to counter Russia
BRUSSELS - NATO and the EU on Wednesday sought ways to boost anti-drone defenses, as Europe scrambles to counter the threat from Russia after a series of air incursions. High-profile incidents in Poland and Estonia have set off a flurry of activity from European officials to plug gaps in the continent's defenses. NATO has launched a new mission and beefed up forces on its eastern border, but it is playing catch-up as it tries to tap Ukraine's experience and get to grips with the drone threat from Moscow. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.
Hybrid Terrain-Aware Path Planning: Integrating VD-RRT* Exploration and VD-D* Lite Repair
Naik, Akshay, Norris, William R., Nottage, Dustin, Soylemezoglu, Ahmet
Autonomous ground vehicles operating off-road must plan curvature-feasible paths while accounting for spatially varying soil strength and slope hazards in real time. We present a continuous state--cost metric that combines a Bekker pressure--sinkage model with elevation-derived slope and attitude penalties. The resulting terrain cost field is analytic, bounded, and monotonic in soil modulus and slope, ensuring well-posed discretization and stable updates under sensor noise. This metric is evaluated on a lattice with exact steering primitives: Dubins and Reeds--Shepp motions for differential drive and time-parameterized bicycle arcs for Ackermann steering. Global exploration is performed using Vehicle-Dynamics RRT\(^{*}\), while local repair is managed by Vehicle-Dynamics D\(^{*}\) Lite, enabling millisecond-scale replanning without heuristic smoothing. By separating the terrain--vehicle model from the planner, the framework provides a reusable basis for deterministic, sampling-based, or learning-driven planning in deformable terrain. Hardware trials on an off-road platform demonstrate real-time navigation across soft soil and slope transitions, supporting reliable autonomy in unstructured environments.
Early Signs of Steganographic Capabilities in Frontier LLMs
Zolkowski, Artur, Nishimura-Gasparian, Kei, McCarthy, Robert, Zimmermann, Roland S., Lindner, David
Monitoring Large Language Model (LLM) outputs is crucial for mitigating risks from misuse and misalignment. However, LLMs could evade monitoring through steganography: Encoding hidden information within seemingly benign generations. In this paper, we evaluate the steganography capabilities in frontier LLMs to better understand the risk they pose. We focus on two types of steganography: passing encoded messages and performing encoded reasoning. We find that current models are unable to encode short messages in their outputs without a monitor noticing under standard affordances. They can succeed, however, if given additional affordances like using an unmonitored scratchpad and coordinating on what encoding scheme to use. We additionally find early signs that models can perform basic encoded reasoning in a simple state-tracking problem. This includes some ability to reason with their own and pre-defined schemes, including encoding schemes such as Hexadecimal. Despite this, they can rarely hide reasoning subtly within a cover task to fool a monitor. Overall, our results indicate that current LLMs exhibit nascent steganographic capabilities. While these capabilities are likely insufficient to bypass well-designed monitors at present, this could change in the future.
A Verification Methodology for Safety Assurance of Robotic Autonomous Systems
Adam, Mustafa, Anisi, David A., Ribeiro, Pedro
Autonomous robots deployed in shared human environments, such as agricultural settings, require rigorous safety assurance to meet both functional reliability and regulatory compliance. These systems must operate in dynamic, unstructured environments, interact safely with humans, and respond effectively to a wide range of potential hazards. This paper presents a verification workflow for the safety assurance of an autonomous agricultural robot, covering the entire development life-cycle, from concept study and design to runtime verification. The outlined methodology begins with a systematic hazard analysis and risk assessment to identify potential risks and derive corresponding safety requirements. A formal model of the safety controller is then developed to capture its behaviour and verify that the controller satisfies the specified safety properties with respect to these requirements. The proposed approach is demonstrated on a field robot operating in an agricultural setting. The results show that the methodology can be effectively used to verify safety-critical properties and facilitate the early identification of design issues, contributing to the development of safer robots and autonomous systems.
Time-IMM: A Dataset and Benchmark for Irregular Multimodal Multivariate Time Series
Chang, Ching, Hwang, Jeehyun, Shi, Yidan, Wang, Haixin, Peng, Wen-Chih, Chen, Tien-Fu, Wang, Wei
Time series data in real-world applications such as healthcare, climate modeling, and finance are often irregular, multimodal, and messy, with varying sampling rates, asynchronous modalities, and pervasive missingness. However, existing benchmarks typically assume clean, regularly sampled, unimodal data, creating a significant gap between research and real-world deployment. We introduce Time-IMM, a dataset specifically designed to capture cause-driven irregularity in multimodal multivariate time series. Time-IMM represents nine distinct types of time series irregularity, categorized into trigger-based, constraint-based, and artifact-based mechanisms. Complementing the dataset, we introduce IMM-TSF, a benchmark library for forecasting on irregular multimodal time series, enabling asynchronous integration and realistic evaluation. IMM-TSF includes specialized fusion modules, including a timestamp-to-text fusion module and a multimodality fusion module, which support both recency-aware averaging and attention-based integration strategies. Empirical results demonstrate that explicitly modeling multimodality on irregular time series data leads to substantial gains in forecasting performance. Time-IMM and IMM-TSF provide a foundation for advancing time series analysis under real-world conditions. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/blacksnail789521/Time-IMM, and the benchmark library can be accessed at https://github.com/blacksnail789521/IMM-TSF. Project page: https://blacksnail789521.github.io/time-imm-project-page/
RedTeamCUA: Realistic Adversarial Testing of Computer-Use Agents in Hybrid Web-OS Environments
Liao, Zeyi, Jones, Jaylen, Jiang, Linxi, Ning, Yuting, Fosler-Lussier, Eric, Su, Yu, Lin, Zhiqiang, Sun, Huan
Computer-use agents (CUAs) promise to automate complex tasks across operating systems (OS) and the web, but remain vulnerable to indirect prompt injection. Current evaluations of this threat either lack support realistic but controlled environments or ignore hybrid web-OS attack scenarios involving both interfaces. To address this, we propose RedTeamCUA, an adversarial testing framework featuring a novel hybrid sandbox that integrates a VM-based OS environment with Docker-based web platforms. Our sandbox supports key features tailored for red teaming, such as flexible adversarial scenario configuration, and a setting that decouples adversarial evaluation from navigational limitations of CUAs by initializing tests directly at the point of an adversarial injection. Using RedTeamCUA, we develop RTC-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark with 864 examples that investigate realistic, hybrid web-OS attack scenarios and fundamental security vulnerabilities. Benchmarking current frontier CUAs identifies significant vulnerabilities: Claude 3.7 Sonnet | CUA demonstrates an ASR of 42.9%, while Operator, the most secure CUA evaluated, still exhibits an ASR of 7.6%. Notably, CUAs often attempt to execute adversarial tasks with an Attempt Rate as high as 92.5%, although failing to complete them due to capability limitations. Nevertheless, we observe concerning high ASRs in realistic end-to-end settings, with the strongest-to-date Claude 4.5 Sonnet | CUA exhibiting the highest ASR of 60%, indicating that CUA threats can already result in tangible risks to users and computer systems. Overall, RedTeamCUA provides an essential framework for advancing realistic, controlled, and systematic analysis of CUA vulnerabilities, highlighting the urgent need for robust defenses to indirect prompt injection prior to real-world deployment.