Hard Pass

Using CRISPR-Cas9, scientists engineered a yeast to produce the nutrient feed. Farmers could have it in two years.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/44833191

Oddly specific.

A Minneapolis woman who confronted federal immigration officers alongside Alex Pretti in January was among a group of potential litigants who spoke out Thursday about alleged excessive force against people protesting or monitoring the enforcement surge in Minnesota.

Georgia Savageford, who introduced herself as Wynnie at a news conference, said she was inside an officer’s vehicle when she saw federal agents shoot Pretti.

“That day has changed me forever,” she said. “The trauma will haunt me for the rest of my life, and I will never be the same.”

Savageford said she had been legally observing the actions of federal officers in Minneapolis ever since the shooting death of Renee Good by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer on Jan. 7. She said she was doing so again on the morning of Jan. 24 when an agent pushed her twice and caused her to fall.

Trump told a lengthy story about negotiating over the price of Sharpie pens. The company says it has no record of any such conversation.

Access options:

• gift link — registration required
• archive.is — sometimes modifies archived pages

Several current and former officials blame intense pressure from the White House.

Acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Todd Lyons has been hospitalized at least twice for stress-related issues as he has carried out Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration agenda — strain that has caused him to struggle to make key decisions for the agency, according to two current and two former administration officials.

During these episodes, the current and former officials said they saw Lyons break out into a full sweat, with his face turning deep red. They also attributed the source of the pressure to ramp up deportations to the White House and top adviser Stephen Miller, who yelled at Lyons during morning phone calls with administration officials, according to four people who were on the calls. Other officials disputed that Miller yelled at Lyons, with one saying the deputy chief of staff was merely “passionate.”

Miller didn’t respond to a request for comment. But the attempt to blame Miller is the latest example of continued infighting among administration figures over immigration policy — even after former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and some of her aides have departed the agency.

AI models that lie and cheat appear to be growing in number with reports of deceptive scheming surging in the last six months, a study into the technology has found.

AI chatbots and agents disregarded direct instructions, evaded safeguards and deceived humans and other AI, according to research funded by the UK government-funded AI Safety Institute (AISI). The study, shared with the Guardian, identified nearly 700 real-world cases of AI scheming and charted a five-fold rise in misbehaviour between October and March, with some AI models destroying emails and other files without permission.

The snapshot of scheming by AI agents “in the wild”, as opposed to in laboratory conditions, has sparked fresh calls for international monitoring of the increasingly capable models and come as Silicon Valley companies aggressively promote the technology as a economically transformative. Last week the UK chancellor also launched a drive to get millions more Britons using AI.

Distributed Denial of Secrets— Mastodon, Bluesky.

Hackers connected to the Iranian government accessed FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal email and posted materials — including photos and documents — taken from his account, a person familiar with the breach confirmed to CNN.

The hackers have published a series of photos of Patel from before he became FBI director that they claim were stolen from his personal email account. A source familiar with the incident confirmed the images’ authenticity.

The stolen emails appear to date from around 2011 to 2022 and appear to include personal, business and travel correspondence that Patel had with various contacts, according to a preliminary CNN review of the files with the help of an independent cybersecurity researcher.