The image of Donald Trump as Halo protagonist Master Chief posted on the White House's X account. The image of Donald Trump as Halo protagonist Master Chief posted on the White House's X account. Why Trump's White House is using video game memes to recruit for ICE A recent spate of posts has garnered attention, but Trump and his allies have long been using gaming imagery to mobilise a toxic subculture of'rootless white males' J ust days after Microsoft announced Halo: Campaign Evolved, the next game in its famous science-fiction series, the White House shared an interesting picture on X . The image, which appears to be AI-generated, shows President Donald Trump wearing the armour of Halo's iconic protagonist, Master Chief, standing in salute in front of an American flag that's missing several stars. In his left hand is an energy sword, a weapon used by the alien enemies in the Halo games.

With the NYC mayoral race coming to a close, Andrew Cuomo is courting right-wing creators. With only 13 days left before the New York City mayoral election, former governor Andrew Cuomo is partnering with some of the same influencers who helped President Donald Trump win the White House last year. Over the past week, right-wing creators like Logan Paul, the former vlogger turned podcaster and WWE wrestler, and Emily Austin, an influencer and sports commentator, have published content featuring Cuomo as a guest on their shows. The appearances have marked a new investment by Cuomo's team into cultivating attention online as a means of competing against the social media-savvy Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani . But instead of trying to cleave off Mamdani's online support, Cuomo appears to be trying to siphon off support from GOP nominee Curtis Sliwa.

This paper introduces the largest and most comprehensive dataset of US presidential campaign television advertisements, available in digital format. The dataset also includes machine-searchable transcripts and high-quality summaries designed to facilitate a variety of academic research. To date, there has been great interest in collecting and analyzing US presidential campaign advertisements, but the need for manual procurement and annotation led many to rely on smaller subsets. We design a large-scale parallelized, AI-based analysis pipeline that automates the laborious process of preparing, transcribing, and summarizing videos. We then apply this methodology to the 9,707 presidential ads from the Julian P. Kanter Political Commercial Archive. We conduct extensive human evaluations to show that these transcripts and summaries match the quality of manually generated alternatives. We illustrate the value of this data by including an application that tracks the genesis and evolution of current focal issue areas over seven decades of presidential elections. Our analysis pipeline and codebase also show how to use LLM-based tools to obtain high-quality summaries for other video datasets.

The Intelligence Community Campus-Bethesda, a vast office complex covered in vertical panels of maroon siding and mirrored glass, sits on a cliff overlooking the Potomac, surrounded by a forty-acre lawn and a tall wrought-iron fence. Roughly three thousand employees of various United States spy agencies work there. About two dozen of them are assigned to the Foreign Malign Influence Center--the command hub of the battle to protect the Presidential election from manipulation by foreign powers. The center, which opened in 2022, is responsible for deciphering, and defeating, surreptitious efforts to rig or tilt the American vote. The October before an election is the busy season.

The United States Defense Department has ideas about a dramatic strategy for defending Taiwan against a Chinese military offensive that would involve deploying an "unmanned hellscape" consisting of thousands of drones buzzing around the island nation. Meanwhile, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology announced a red-team hacking competition this week with the AI ethics nonprofit Humane Intelligence to find flaws and biases in generative AI systems. WIRED took a closer look at the Telegram channel and website known as Deep State that uses public data and secret intelligence to power its live-tracker map of Ukraine's evolving front line. Protesters went to Citi Field in New York on Wednesday to raise awareness about the serious privacy risks of deploying facial recognition systems at sporting venues. The technology has increasingly been implemented at stadiums and arenas across the country with little oversight.

Microsoft researchers said on Friday that Iran government-tied hackers tried breaking into the account of a "high-ranking official" on the US presidential campaign in June, weeks after breaching the account of a county-level US official. The breaches were part of Iranian groups' increasing attempts to influence the US presidential election in November, the researchers said in a report that did not provide any further detail on the apparent official in question. The report follows recent statements by senior US intelligence officials that they had seen Iran ramp up use of clandestine social media accounts with the aim to use them to try to sow political discord in the US. The report also reveals how Russia and China are exploiting US political polarization to advance their own divisive messaging in a consequential election year. Iran's mission to the UN in New York told Reuters in a statement that its cyber capabilities were "defensive and proportionate to the threats it faces" and that it had no plans to launch cyber-attacks.

Google has come under fire from conservatives in the United States amid claims that the tech giant is suppressing information about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in order to influence the presidential election. Trump, who is running for a second term in the White House on the Republican Party ticket, narrowly escaped being killed when a lone gunman opened fire at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on July 13. The attack, which killed one rally attendee, injured two others, and bloodied the former president's ear, has spawned a number of unsubstantiated claims and conspiracy theories. The latest revolves around Google Search's autocomplete feature, which is designed to help users save time by predicting their search query based on the opening letters or words that are inputted. Over the weekend, some internet users noticed that writing about assassination attempts in the Google search bar did not automatically prompt search queries about the shooting of Trump.

U.S. intelligence officials believe that Iran is trying to sabotage former President Trump's presidential campaign through online influence operations, according to a press briefing on Monday. Speaking to reporters, an official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said U.S. spy agencies "observed Tehran working to influence the presidential election," likely because Iranian leaders want to avoid increased tensions with the U.S. The official didn't directly say that Iran was trying to undermine Trump, but that American spies "haven't observed a shift in Iran's preferences" since 2020, meaning that Iran was still targeting Trump. During the briefing, an intelligence official also said Iran is utilizing "vast webs of online personas and propaganda mills to spread disinformation," in addition to different online campaigns. U.S. intelligence officials believe Iran is meddling in the 2024 election. Earlier in July, Tehran was accused of a separate plot to kill Trump after a gunman shot the former president at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13.

Most of Joe Biden's past supporters see him as too old. An 81-year-old president with an unsteady step is a turn-off. But Donald Trump, Biden's malignant, 77-year-old predecessor, vows to be a dictator for "a day", calls for suspending the constitution and threatens Nato. "Russia, if you're listening", his infamous 2016 shout-out to Vladimir Putin, still haunts us eight years on. Democracy is on the ballot again.

Americans in the nation's capital shared their biggest concerns about artificial intelligence, citing fears about election interference and job security. WASHINGTON, D.C. – Americans in the nation's capital told Fox News their biggest concerns about artificial intelligence, with some saying they were afraid the rapidly advancing tech could lead to voter manipulation during the 2024 election cycle or eliminate jobs. "When things like that have too much control … the power to swing is too far," Cori, of Washington, D.C., told Fox News. "I do think that its gotten wildly out of control." AI's rapidly growing tech has consistently raised concerns about its ability to manipulate elections and eliminate jobs.