Don't Listen to Anyone Who Thinks Secession Will Solve Anything Americans increasingly fantasize about a divorce between red and blue states--but they dread the thought of civil war. You can't have one without the other. It's become almost like a histamine response: After a shocking national event like the assassination of Charlie Kirk, or Donald Trump's deployment of the military to Los Angeles last June, mentions of the term " civil war " and calls for secession surge online. This kind of talk flared again in January, when two citizens were shot and killed by immigration agents on the streets of Minneapolis, and governor Tim Walz mobilized the Minnesota National Guard to be ready to support local law enforcement. "I mean, is this a Fort Sumter?" Walz said in an interview with The Atlantic, invoking the battle that sparked the Civil War.

DHS Has Been Collecting US Citizens' DNA for Years Newly released data shows Customs and Border Protection funneled the DNA of nearly 2,000 US citizens--some as young as 14--into an FBI crime database, raising alarms about oversight and legality. Save this storyFor years, Customs and Border Protection agents have been quietly harvesting DNA from American citizens, including minors, and funneling the samples into an FBI crime database, government data shows. This expansion of genetic surveillance was never authorized by Congress for citizens, children, or civil detainees. According to newly released government data analyzed by Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy & Technology, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees CBP, collected the DNA of nearly 2,000 US citizens between 2020 and 2024 and had it sent to CODIS, the FBI's nationwide system for policing investigations. An estimated 95 were minors, some as young as 14. The entries also include travelers never charged with a crime and dozens of cases where agents left the "charges" field blank.

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) introduces dual-use capabilities that could both threaten and bolster national security and public safety (NSPS). Models implement safeguards to protect against potential misuse relevant to NSPS and allow for benign users to receive helpful information. However, current benchmarks often fail to test safeguard robustness to potential NSPS risks in an objective, robust way. We introduce FORTRESS: 500 expert-crafted adversarial prompts with instance-based rubrics of 4-7 binary questions for automated evaluation across 3 domains (unclassified information only): Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear and Explosive (CBRNE), Political Violence & Terrorism, and Criminal & Financial Illicit Activities, with 10 total subcategories across these domains. Each prompt-rubric pair has a corresponding benign version to test for model over-refusals. This evaluation of frontier LLMs' safeguard robustness reveals varying trade-offs between potential risks and model usefulness: Claude-3.5-Sonnet demonstrates a low average risk score (ARS) (14.09 out of 100) but the highest over-refusal score (ORS) (21.8 out of 100), while Gemini 2.5 Pro shows low over-refusal (1.4) but a high average potential risk (66.29). Deepseek-R1 has the highest ARS at 78.05, but the lowest ORS at only 0.06. Models such as o1 display a more even trade-off between potential risks and over-refusals (with an ARS of 21.69 and ORS of 5.2). To provide policymakers and researchers with a clear understanding of models' potential risks, we publicly release FORTRESS at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ScaleAI/fortress_public. We also maintain a private set for evaluation.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is opening a wonderful world of immense possibilities. Such prospects include, for example, helping save the Amazon by forecasting deforestation; automation and job creation through reskilling; mitigating and managing climate change by measuring emissions; boosting the discovery of new drugs; fighting terrorism and transforming national security; and improving criminal justice system and cutting crime rates. AI-based autonomous vehicles -- cars, trucks, buses and drone delivery systems -- are already impacting our lives. By using AI, metropolitan areas could be transformed into smart cities for service delivery, environment planning, power utilization, handling emergencies and much more. These are some of the known and knowable problems that the applications of AI algorithms can solve with greater efficiency.

Every other day, my WhatsApp bursts with messages from friends in Brazil and abroad expressing equal parts of excitement and apprehension as Sunday's Brazilian presidential elections approach. On Wednesday, my best friend who lives in the country's capital, Brasília, texted to say she was scared of wearing red clothes to go vote this weekend because red is the color associated with the Worker's Party of former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula, the current front-runner, has a real, if slim, chance to beat far-right incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro in the first round by getting more than 50 percent of valid votes. "The mood is terrible," she wrote, later adding that in the last 48 hours, four instances of political violence had been recorded across the country. My friend's worries are justified.

'Tucker Carlson Tonight' host makes the case for why Kyle Rittenhouse is not receiving a fair trial The judge in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial has just sent the jurors home for the night to think about the trial for yet another day. So far, deliberations, in this case, have lasted about 20 hours. In a normal proceeding, we'd have the jury's decision in about 20 minutes. The essential question, in this case, is really clear did Kyle Rittenhouse have good reason to believe dangerous men were trying to murder him? And the answer is also clear and unequivocal?

Violence, whether it is focused on individuals such as crime or at larger scales such as war, seems to be almost inevitable in our world. However, researchers are asking if it can be prevented and if geospatial big data techniques, including machine learning methods, could potentially be used to prevent violence from going out of control. A recent World Economic Form blog has highlighted varied efforts that attempt to mitigate violence at different scales, with geospatial data often a core feature of different methods discussed in these tools.[1] Two tools have been recently developed that focus on small-scale acts of violence and harassment. Using crowdsourcing and hot spot mapping, Safecity and HarassMap[2] have been created, which depict recent trends of assaults, sexual harassment, and local crime to help individuals determine areas to avoid.