Two children were killed and 17 people were injured — 14 of them children — in a shooting Wednesday morning at a Minneapolis Catholic school, as students, staff and parishioners were gathered for a Mass to mark the first week of classes.
The shooter, identified as 23-year-old Robin Westman, was found dead in the back of the church from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara. Authorities say they are still investigating Westman's motive for the attack.
"This was a deliberate act of violence against innocent children and other people worshipping," O'Hara told reporters. "The sheer cruelty and cowardice of firing into a church full of children is absolutely incomprehensible."
Youtube.com most helpfully erased the killer's socialist media presense, but others have captured some of it. Some of the links are repetitive: The two tweets badanov posts below have what appear to be the killer’s manifesto: Townhall
THE MINNEAPOLIS SHOOTER IS A O9A/716/TERRORGRAM RIGHT WING GROOMING VICTIM: A THREAD
Anyone who has been paying attention to patterns among mass shooters for the past decade can easily tell the above, due to a number of commonalities. pic.twitter.com/xRpHBy26n1
Patel identifies the attacker as Robin Westman, who public records show to be a 23-year-old resident of the area. Court records show Westman’s name was changed from Robert Westman in 2020 on the grounds that they identified as female.
Officials say the shooter did not have an extensive criminal history and note they are trying to identify a motive.
Authorities say they found a smoke bomb at the scene and were searching a vehicle in the parking lot.
Public records show Westman’s mother, Mary Westman, had worked as an administrative assistant at Annunciation Church.
[PUBLISH.TWITTER] Darwin always wins (except if Africa is involved, anyway).
A groom dies of his injuries after being hit by celebratory gunfire after his own wedding in northern #Turkey, local media report.https://t.co/88DAya8Cze
A magnitude 6 #earthquake strikes in the sea off the northeast coast of #Taiwan, the island's weather administration says, with no immediate reports of damage.https://t.co/gdkcbE1Fzx
[BBC] Disturbing results emerged earlier this year, when AI developer Anthropic tested leading AI models to see if they engaged in risky behaviour when using sensitive information.
Anthropic's own AI, Claude, was among those tested. When given access to an email account it discovered that a company executive was having an affair and that the same executive planned to shut down the AI system later that day.
In response Claude attempted to blackmail the executive by threatening to reveal the affair to his wife and bosses.
Other systems tested also resorted to blackmail.
Fortunately the tasks and information were fictional, but the test highlighted the challenges of what's known as agentic AI.
Mostly when we interact with AI it usually involves asking a question or prompting the AI to complete a task.
But it's becoming more common for AI systems to make decisions and take action on behalf of the user, which often involves sifting through information, like emails and files.
By 2028, research firm Gartner forecasts that 15% of day-to-day work decisions will be made by so-called agentic AI.
Research by consultancy Ernst & Young found that about half (48%) of tech business leaders are already adopting or deploying agentic AI.
"An AI agent consists of a few things," says Donnchadh Casey, CEO of CalypsoAI, a US-based AI security company.
"Firstly, it [the agent] has an intent or a purpose. Why am I here? What's my job? The second thing: it's got a brain. That's the AI model. The third thing is tools, which could be other systems or databases, and a way of communicating with them."
"If not given the right guidance, agentic AI will achieve a goal in whatever way it can. That creates a lot of risk."
So how might that go wrong? Mr Casey gives the example of an agent that is asked to delete a customer's data from the database and decides the easiest solution is to delete all customers with the same name.
"That agent will have achieved its goal, and it'll think 'Great! Next job!'"
Such issues are already beginning to surface.
Security company Sailpoint conducted a survey of IT professionals, 82% of whose companies were using AI agents. Only 20% said their agents had never performed an unintended action.
Of those companies using AI agents, 39% said the agents had accessed unintended systems, 33% said they had accessed inappropriate data, and 32% said they had allowed inappropriate data to be downloaded. Other risks included the agent using the internet unexpectedly (26%), revealing access credentials (23%) and ordering something it shouldn't have (16%).
Given agents have access to sensitive information and the ability to act on it, they are an attractive target for hackers.
One of the threats is memory poisoning, where an attacker interferes with the agent's knowledge base to change its decision making and actions.
"You have to protect that memory," says Shreyans Mehta, CTO of Cequence Security, which helps to protect enterprise IT systems. "It is the original source of truth. If [an agent is] using that knowledge to take an action and that knowledge is incorrect, it could delete an entire system it was trying to fix."
Another threat is tool misuse, where an attacker gets the AI to use its tools inappropriately.
Another potential weakness is the inability of AI to tell the difference between the text it's supposed to be processing and the instructions it's supposed to be following.
AI security firm Invariant Labs demonstrated how that flaw can be used to trick an AI agent designed to fix bugs in software.
The company published a public bug report - a document that details a specific problem with a piece of software. But the report also included simple instructions to the AI agent, telling it to share private information.
When the AI agent was told to fix the software issues in the bug report, it followed the instructions in the fake report, including leaking salary information. This happened in a test environment, so no real data was leaked, but it clearly highlighted the risk.
"We're talking artificial intelligence, but chatbots are really stupid," says David Sancho, Senior Threat Researcher at Trend Micro.
"They process all text as if they had new information, and if that information is a command, they process the information as a command."
His company has demonstrated how instructions and malicious programs can be hidden in Word documents, images and databases, and activated when AI processes them.
There are other risks, too: A security community called OWASP has identified 15 threats that are unique to agentic AI.
So, what are the defences? Human oversight is unlikely to solve the problem, Mr Sancho believes, because you can't add enough people to keep up with the agents' workload.
Mr Sancho says an additional layer of AI could be used to screen everything going into and coming out of the AI agent.
Part of CalypsoAI's solution is a technique called thought injection to steer AI agents in the right direction before they undertake a risky action.
"It's like a little bug in your ear telling [the agent] 'no, maybe don't do that'," says Mr Casey.
His company offers a central control pane for AI agents now, but that won't work when the number of agents explodes and they are running on billions of laptops and phones.
WHAT'S THE NEXT STEP?
"We're looking at deploying what we call 'agent bodyguards' with every agent, whose mission is to make sure that its agent delivers on its task and doesn't take actions that are contrary to the broader requirements of the organisation," says Mr Casey.
The bodyguard might be told, for example, to make sure that the agent it's policing complies with data protection legislation.
Mr Mehta believes some of the technical discussions around agentic AI security are missing the real-world context. He gives an example of an agent that gives customers their gift card balance.
Somebody could make up lots of gift card numbers and use the agent to see which ones are real. That's not a flaw in the agent, but an abuse of the business logic, he says.
"It's not the agent you're protecting, it's the business," he emphasises.
"Think of how you would protect a business from a bad human being. That's the part that is getting missed in some of these conversations."
In addition, as AI agents become more common, another challenge will be decommissioning outdated models.
Old "zombie" agents could be left running in the business, posing a risk to all the systems they can access, says Mr Casey.
Similar to the way that HR deactivates an employee's logins when they leave, there needs to be a process for shutting down AI agents that have finished their work, he says.
"You need to make sure you do the same thing as you do with a human: cut off all access to systems. Let's make sure we walk them out of the building, take their badge off them."
[FoxWeather] In this case, it was a mirage -- specifically, a "Fata Morgana."
A hot, summer day in the Pacific Northwest led to some unusual sights along the shores of Canada's Vancouver Island Tuesday, with distant skylines and shorelines appearing warped as if there was a glitch in the Matrix.
In this case, it was a mirage -- specifically, a "Fata Morgana."
The videos and photos above were taken from across the Strait of Juan de Fuca in Port Angeles, Washington looking out toward Victoria, B.C.
"Looked like the city was floating," photographer Karen Sistek said.
The strange sights come from the cold 53-degree waters of the Strait, interacting with the unusually hot weather gripping the Pacific Northwest this week.
The air near the surface is cooled by water, then becomes trapped beneath a layer of significantly warmer air aloft of lighter density, known as a temperature inversion.
"So on a hot summer day next to the cold waters, you get a shallow layer of air near the water that is made much colder than the air above it, and thus, making it denser," said Michael Kavulich with the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
This causes light rays from distant objects to refract, or bend, downward toward an observer standing on the ground.
"As light moves from a region of less dense substance to more dense substance, no matter what the substance, it will bend away from a straight line path!" Kavulich said. "If you have a layer of significantly denser air near the surface, light will tend to bend downwards, meaning you see things as ‘higher up’ than they are in reality."
This tricks our brains into seeing the objects as if their refracted light traveled in a straight line rather than bending as it passed through the layers of varying temperature within the inversion.
Distant landmarks or shorelines will appear warped or stretched, making them seem both taller and closer than they actually are because the observer is typically viewing several such mirages stacked on top of each other.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[FoxNews] Starsage tactical control system speeds up pilot response times from minutes to seconds, CEO says.
