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The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 6 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

After Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan, Donald Trump uncorked a screed smearing him as crazy and a communist loser. And of course, that tweet previews what the GOP attack on him actually will be, only it’ll be backed by hundreds of millions of dollars. In the full expectation of this, El-Sayed delivered a victory speech and then remarks to reporters that framed the attack on Trump and on MAGA that seems likely to animate his campaign.

Can it work? Is it enough? How will El-Sayed overcome the other serious challenges he faces in this race? We’re really psyched to be discussing all this with Ron Brownstein, senior political analyst at CNN and columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, whose recent piece about the contest is a reminder that he’s the best in the business at explaining this stuff. Ron, great to have you on.

Ron Brownstein: Greg, glad to be with you.

Sargent: So Abdul El-Sayed, a former public health official who was born in Michigan, the son of Egyptian immigrants, just won the primary by less than a point over the more moderate Haley Stevens. El-Sayed is harshly critical of Israel, is running a left-populist campaign for Medicare for All and targeting billionaires and the establishment. Ron, El-Sayed won big among young and college-educated voters, but Stevens won in the more rural and working-class areas. Can you explain why that portends a serious challenge for him in the general election against Mike Rogers?

Brownstein: Yeah. You remember, like, a phrase that I popularized about 15 years ago was that Democratic presidential primaries divide between the wine track—candidates who appeal to young people and college-educated whites—and the beer track—candidates who mostly appeal to working-class whites, Black voters, and seniors. That’s kind of gotten scrambled at the presidential level in the last few cycles, but it sure wasn’t in evidence in Michigan. 

I mean, this was a pure wine-track, beer-track coalition. And the answer is that whether it was Stevens or El-Sayed who won, neither side of that is enough to win a purple state like Michigan. You need both. And in the first general election polling that’s out there, from EPIC-MRA, El-Sayed, not surprisingly, is underperforming among voters over 50, Black voters, and non-college white women. So he’s got to do some work to knit together the coalition the Democrat needs to win in November.

Sargent: Ron, so what does he have to do? Basically, the poll you’re talking about, or at least a number of public polls, if you look at them all together—basically what they show was that El-Sayed is running behind where Stevens is running against Mike Rogers. 

So it depends on the poll, but it’s maybe around five points, six points, seven points—Stevens is running by that much more. So he has to win that chunk of voters, the voters who would vote for Stevens against Mike Rogers, but not vote for El-Sayed as of now against Mike Rogers, right? Who are those voters?

Brownstein: Well, I think they’re fundamentally Trump disapprovers. I mean, you know, as we’ve talked about before, in Trump’s first term, Susan Collins in 2020 was the only Republican senator or challenger who won a Senate race in a state where more people disapproved than approved of his job performance, according to the exit polls. 

In that EPIC-MRA poll, 63 percent of voters in Michigan now disapprove of Trump. You know, basically an amoeba should be able to win in that environment. There’s just no precedent for Republicans winning a Senate race in a state where Trump is that unpopular. But in that poll, El-Sayed is way underperforming among the disapprovers. What the political strategists call double haters are probably the people who are going to decide this race. 

I mean, the odds are high that there is going to be a big chunk of voters, maybe as much as 20 percent, who have an unfavorable view of El-Sayed at the end, after all this Republican money and after his own choices, but also disapprove of Trump.

So how do they vote in the end? In the past, double haters have tended to vote against the party in the White House. But Republicans hope that El-Sayed is such a reach for those voters that they can win more of them than they usually do. And I think that will be the pivot point of this race—people who disapprove of Trump and are somewhat hesitant about El-Sayed.

Sargent: Ron, who are those voters? Are those voters basically the same constituencies that essentially were more likely to vote for Stevens than for El-Sayed?

Brownstein: Logically you would say yes, but we don’t really have detailed enough evidence for that. You know, I suspect there are also some college whites in there beyond the Democratic primary. I think it’s going to be pretty broad-based. 

I mean, I think, you know, El-Sayed has run kind of a factional campaign. I mean, he presents himself as the leader of a movement. He’s been really focused on Israel and AIPAC, which is of less interest to a broader general electorate. And so I think he’s going to face a fair amount of suspicion, or resistance at least, among the broad electorate. 

But Trump is not going to get much more popular between now and November in Michigan. And so that group of people who are dubious of both, I think, will be the tug of war in this race.

Sargent: Well, Donald Trump issued a tweet that said this, quote: “Great news for the Republican Party. El-Sayed, a communist loser who hates Jews in Israel, is the projected winner in his race with the socialist. Now the Dumocrats’ crazy policies will only get worse.” 

I think by socialist he means Haley Stevens, which is utterly preposterous, but whatever. Ron, we’re going to see hundreds of millions of dollars put behind that precise message that Donald Trump put in that tweet. They’re going to paint him as a radical, a terrorist sympathizer, someone who pals around with far-leftists like Hasan Piker. They’re going to highlight his support for abolishing ICE, et cetera. That’s aimed at the landscape that you described before, right? In other words, they’re conscious of what you essentially said the challenge here is going to be.

Brownstein: Yeah. And, look, I mean, we have not had a Democratic nominee in a swing state try to defend Medicare for All, even, for example. Like, you know, the most striking thing—I was in Michigan over the weekend—the most striking thing I heard was in a Black church on Saturday afternoon, where the reverend, who is the statewide president for Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, described El-Sayed as a one-hit wonder who cares more about Palestine than Detroit. 

I mean, so there’s a lot of pressure points here. But you can’t lose sight of the other side of the equation. You know, Greg, in 2024, 51 percent of Michigan voters had an unfavorable view of Trump, according to the exit poll. And Mike Rogers won only 10 percent of them. That’s about what every Republican candidate in Trump’s first term, except for Susan Collins, won among people who disapproved of him.

OK, in this election, it is likely that somewhere around 60 percent of Michigan voters are going to be unfavorable to Trump, which means that Rogers is going to have to win close to twice as many Trump disapprovers as anybody else did except Collins in the first term, or as he basically did in 2024. I don’t think that’s impossible against El-Sayed, but it is still a reach. And so it is possible that El-Sayed could way underperform the underlying environment and still squeeze by.

Sargent: Let’s talk a little bit about how El-Sayed talked about Trumpism during his victory speech late Tuesday night. Listen to this.

Abdul El-Sayed (voiceover): He can’t decide which era of Republican he wants to be from. On the one hand, he was from the neocon era that had us fighting unnecessary wars in Iraq, swore up and down he could never support Donald Trump, then went to Mar-a-Lago when he decided to run for Senate the first time, and licked all the boots until he finally got that Trump endorsement. So he’s both the worst of the neocon era and the worst of the MAGA era. And I just think that’s the worst of all. Because at least you should know who you are. But I promise you, Mike, by the time we are done with you, all of Michigan is going to know who you are.

Sargent: Ron, I like the way he depicts his Republican opponent as a Trump bootlicker, which indicts the deep corruption of that, and then goes after MAGA, which you don’t hear Dems do often in swing areas. The idea of the fusion of the neocon era and the MAGA era goes after what Trumpism really is, what Trump has created—a GOP that combines militarism and white nationalism and authoritarianism. 

And yet, I’ve got to think, language like “neocon” doesn’t seem exactly like general election language. It’s online language a little bit. It shouldn’t be, but it is. What do you think of all that?

Brownstein: I think his description of Rogers is pretty effective, with the caveat that you mentioned about—look, this is a guy who in the first debate with Haley Stevens described childcare as a gender justice issue. I mean, he’s kind of got to get out of the library a little bit. And look, he has that experience, but you know, he does have that whiff of kind of the online self-closeted left, or self-reinforcing left. But I think that description of Rogers is effective.

But I think, like a lot of the Bernie-inspired candidates, he really doesn’t want to focus on Trump as a unique threat to the American system. At his rally Friday night in Dearborn, he said, as Bernie often did in his runs, Trump is a symptom. Trump is not the disease. Trump is a symptom of a corrupt system where special interests—in his case, symbolized by AIPAC—have too much influence. 

I don’t think that is as much of a winning argument in 2026 as that Trump himself is taking the country in the wrong direction. And like a lot of the Bernie candidates, he doesn’t really want to lean on that. He wants to basically say the entire system is corrupt. Like many of the Bernie candidates, he often seems more energized criticizing the Democratic leadership than he does Trump.

And so the job for a Democratic nominee in Michigan really isn’t that complicated. You don’t have to change the electorate. You don’t have to inspire a movement. You just have to win as many voters who disapprove of Trump as every other Democratic nominee did in his first term, except for Sara Gideon against Susan Collins. That’s it. That’s what you have to do. 

And, I thought in his victory speech the other day, El-Sayed was talking about the movement that he’s inspired, how his election is going to change politics forever. Really? Like, you know, you won an election by 15,000 votes, and that’s going to change politics forever. There was a lot of “me,” not quite enough “you,” I thought, particularly for voters who are not tuned in politically. In a Democratic primary, railing against AIPAC is really powerful. For a swing voter who is worrying about  paying the bills, it could not be less relevant. 

And so I felt like, you know, watching him as a candidate, and even watching him on election night and the morning after, he seems to me like he has to broaden who he’s talking to and how he is talking to them. Like, as I said, this is a guy who called childcare a gender justice issue. I cannot imagine there is a working mom in small-town Michigan who has thought of it in exactly those terms.

Sargent: Right. I think the problem is that he is torn between, on the one side, going after the GOP-MAGA, which is something that is really ripe right now, especially in a place like Michigan where Trump is at sixty percent disapproving. And then on the other side of the equation, he wants to indict the whole system. And there’s sort of a strain in this type of left-leaning thinking that holds that if you’re talking too much about Trump and MAGA, you’re not talking about the more systemic problems. 

Politically, I feel like he could go very hard at Trump and MAGA here, maybe harder. I do want to credit him, though, with going after MAGA the way he did. He gets that MAGA is the problem to some degree, right? He just has to centralize Trump a little more, I think. What do you think of that?

Brownstein: Well, no, I agree. I mean, I think that, like as I said, like many of—like Sanders himself and many of the candidates he’s inspired—he doesn’t really dwell on Trump. I mean, El-Sayed explicitly said on Friday night, in kind of a closing-argument rally, I view Trump as a symptom, not the disease. The disease is that there’s all this money corrupting politics, and it’s symbolized by all the money that AIPAC spent against me. And there is an audience for that, but the core—what is the tailwind for Democrats this year? What is the core argument? It’s that voters feel that Trump has not delivered on what he promised. 

The swing voters feel that. And Democratic voters believe he is just out of control, threatening the fundamentals of the country, our values, our laws. And putting a check on Trump is really the core argument that Democrats have in ‘26. And I feel like a lot of the Sanders-inspired candidates—he kind of refuses to focus that, or is reluctant to focus that in the way that it would be most powerful, because, as you said, it gets in the way of this broader, somewhat more academic, I think, to many voters, arguments about how the system functions or doesn’t.

Sargent: Right. And underscoring your point, let’s listen to what El-Sayed said to reporters. It’s another rendition of the Trump bootlicker line. Check this out.

El-Sayed (voiceover): Mike Rogers is a guy who has never shied away from a corporation he could do a favor for. Mike Rogers is a guy who, believe it or not, went back to Florida so he could lick every single boot Donald Trump owns to beg for his endorsement. I’m so sorry—if you want a senator who’s going to lick some boots, fine, go vote for Mike Rogers. But if you want a senator who’s going to stand up to Donald Trump, then you’ve got your option right here.

Sargent: So, Ron, there he’s doing what I think we want to see more of, which is cast this race as a referendum, or a choice, between someone who will rein in Trump and stand up to Trump on the one hand, and someone who licks his boots on the other. And it also goes after Trump in a deeper sense. He’s essentially saying Trump requires Republicans to corruptly act as the servants of him and the servants of corporations. He should probably talk more like that, right?

Brownstein: Yeah, well, look, I’m not here to give him campaign advice, but I think it would—yeah, as I said, like many of the Sanders candidates, he is kind of pulling away from what is the strongest Democratic argument in 2026, because it interferes with this broader point that he wants to make. 

Again, like, he can win. I mean, there’s no question he can win. Trump’s disapproval is at a point where he doesn’t have to do anything special to win. He only has to win somewhere a little north of 80 percent of people who disapprove of Trump, which should be very doable. 

But there are a lot of reasons—not only in his argument, but also in his positions, and, let’s face it, in his background—that are going to create hurdles for him in doing that. And, you know, it’s going to be a tight campaign. I mean, it’s going to be a lot tighter, I think, than it would have been with Stevens.

Sargent: Yes, I fear that that’s the case. Agree that it’s totally doable. Let’s listen to one more stretch of El-Sayed talking here. Listen to this.

El-Sayed (voiceover): I look in front of me and I see all kinds of colors, all kinds of stories coming together around the idea that we can have nice things. We just can’t do it alone. That to have them, we’re going to need to reach across the divides they tell us we can’t breach—divides of race, of faith, of geography, of sexual orientation, gender identity. And so as we continue forward for the next 13 weeks, I am asking you to put your shoulder in the work to make sure that we defeat Mike Rogers, we defeat and send a blow to Trumpism, and we do the work of building that next 250 years that all of us deserve. Because at some point, whether you know them or you don’t, the future will ask you, what did you do in this moment? For me, it looks like two little girls, ethnically half Indian like their mom, ethnically half Egyptian like me, 100 percent American.

Sargent: Ron, I don’t think it’s an accident that he juxtaposed the need to go after Trumpism with this kind of rhapsodic take on the diversity of his audience and the Americanness of his two kids and of himself, despite his kids being half Indian and half Egyptian. That again kind of goes to the core of what people are angry at Trump about, which is that Trump is he’s essentially trying to wreck that aspect of what makes America great—diversity, immigration. He’s a white nationalist, in short. 

And so I think he’s getting close to the type of indictment he needs of Trump and Trumpism, just not quite there. What do you think?

Brownstein: Well, I think that, you know, ultimately, the voters who are available to a Democrat, realistically, even in a state like Michigan, overwhelmingly believe that. I mean, that is the idea of the coalition of transformation—that Democrats ultimately rely on the voters who are comfortable with the way the country is changing demographically, culturally, and economically. The issue isn’t that message. 

The issue is the extent to which other things he has said and done kind of belie that, or give Republicans ammunition. When he said “hurt people hurt people” about the synagogue attack, right? I mean, that’s—there is a kind of sectarianism about his campaign. And there needs to be—if he is going to win, he has to talk to people who are just either not interested in that argument, you know, or are somewhat leery of it, or somewhat concerned about it. And you know, you can’t win in Michigan just by unifying the Democratic base, even if he succeeds in doing that.

Sargent: I want to point this out, though, Ron. I think he’s talking about this idea of his kids being 100 percent American and himself being 100 percent American, juxtaposed with Trumpism, as the beginnings of a rebuttal to the attack he’s going to face. 

So I think what’s going to happen here is those hundreds of millions of dollars are essentially going to try to do to him what they tried to do to Barack Obama, right? So I think Hasan Piker will sort of function as the Reverend Wright.

Brownstein: But Greg, think about the difference. That is the core. Obama directly dealt with it.

Sargent: Yes, I agree. I agree. 

Brownstein: And El-Sayed is basically saying live with it. 

Sargent: Right. I just want to get at what El-Sayed thinks he’s doing, though, right? Because I think what he thinks he’s doing is, OK, I’m about to face hundreds of millions of dollars, which cast me as an alien, threatening, anti-American figure, a terrorist, right? Basically. And so when he talks about how American he is, and unabashedly talks about his immigrant heritage, he’s sort of staking out the beginnings of a rebuttal to that attack on him. I don’t think it’s there. I agree with you. 

I just want to sort of underscore that that’s where he thinks he’s going, and maybe ask your opinion on what he really needs to do with that.

Brownstein: Can he get there with Hasan Piker next to him? That’s the question. And you know, I think that, as I said, I think that argument is very appealing to—anyone who is open to voting for a Democrat would accept that argument. That my kids are the proof of what America is. I mean, that is the greatness of America. But that doesn’t erase Hasan Piker from the picture. And it doesn’t erase “hurt people hurt people” from the picture. 

I mean, he is not running as Barack Obama did in 2008, as many people have pointed out to me, who I’ve talked to in the last couple of weeks. And I think he will try to get there. But this is not that. This is, like, this is a very different—this is a more narrow-casting kind of political strategy. And it proved to have a lot more limits. It proved to be a lot more narrowly cast, even in the primary, than they expected.

Again, having said all this, Trump is unpopular enough that he might be able to win. But whether this is a model that other Democrats should be following—I would submit to you that the issue is not only whether he wins. The issue is, compare him to Jocelyn Benson, a more centrist candidate. If he runs seven, eight points behind her and wins, is the message of that that a Bernie-style candidate can win Michigan in 2028? Or is it that if you have an environment that is less advantageous for Democrats, this is just not sellable to a majority?

Sargent: Right. I agree. I think, though, that in his head he’s moving beyond the Bernie campaign, at least to some degree. I think he thinks he’s doing that with the paeans to Americanism and so forth. I guess what you’re saying here is there’s going to have to be some sort of very clear articulation of something much more Obama-like than he’s doing right now. Is that the essence of your point?

Brownstein: I think so. I mean, I don’t know if it’s essential—like I said, he might be able to win without it, because of the environment. But I do think that he has anchored himself in a way. There’s not been a Reverend Wright speech here at all. I mean, there’s been nothing like that. In fact, there’s been defiance. 

There are reasons why there are a lot of voters, including on the Democratic side, who worry about him appearing with Hasan Piker. I don’t have a huge opinion on that, but it’s clearly something that is troubling for a lot of even Democratic voters. And his instinct is to say you’re wrong. That’s his instinct.

Sargent: Right. What he’s saying is, they’re going to say Hasan Piker, Hasan Piker, Hasan Piker, and I’m going to say, well, I’m fully American and my immigrant heritage makes me American.

Brownstein: There’s only so far you can move. There’s only so far you can move with him still in the picture.

Sargent: You think that there’s got to be some sort of more comprehensive and thought-through rebuttal to the Hasan Piker attacks?

Brownstein: Yeah. Well, but it’s not just that, right? I mean, I think he very much in his campaign—whether it’s on the foreign policy stuff with Israel, or the way he frames the domestic political situation—he identified very much in that Bernie lane. 

And it was just enough, as it was in 2016, for Bernie barely beating Hillary in the Michigan primary. It was just enough to get the nomination. But it’s hard to imagine, even in this year, that’s enough to win in Michigan.

Sargent: OK, Ron. So what does the winning coalition look like in granular terms?

Brownstein: Yeah, I mean, I think usually Democrats have to get to somewhere in the high thirties among non-college whites, or the low 40s, to win in Michigan. And we’ll have to see how well he does among college white men as well. I mean, you know, the winning coalition for Democrats in a Rust Belt state like Michigan—non-college whites are about half or more of the electorate. Democrats no longer have to win most of them, but they can’t get annihilated among them. 

If he only wins 35 percent of non-college whites, he is not going to win. I mean, he’s probably got to win a little more than that. He’s got to win north of 85 percent of Black voters, and he’s got to turn them out. And then he’s probably got to win a majority of college whites. I mean, that would be the winning coalition, I think, for him. And all of that is doable in this environment, but none of it will be easy, especially with the way he has presented himself to this point.

El-Sayed’s victory is the most important win for the left in this primary season. I mean, the left has won some big primaries, the center has won some big primaries. This, without a doubt, is the biggest win for the left. But it instantly becomes the biggest test for the left. Because I think if he wins the nomination but doesn’t win the general election, the message and the momentum going into ‘28 for the left looks very different than if he does win the general election. And the same thing with Francesca Hong in Wisconsin. 

If she wins the nomination but doesn’t win the general election, I think the interpretation of Democrats in states they absolutely must have to get the White House back in ‘28—I think the interpretation of their experience is going to be very different than if they do win. So this is like the undercard. The main event is still to come.

Sargent: It’s going to be really tough, but as you say, doable. Ron Brownstein, thanks so much for coming on. As I said before, you’re really showing here why you’re the best at this stuff.

Brownstein: Always great to be with you, Greg.

Microsoft has dropped a reminder that Windows 10 LTSC 2021 will wheeze its last breath soon, and enterprises need to plan for the event. While free support for most editions of Windows 10 ended last year, Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021 is still receiving updates. That support will end on January 12, 2027, with a final security update. The good news is that administrators can keep the security updates flowing via the Extended Security Updates (ESU) program. The bad news is the price: $61 per device for Year 1, doubling in each subsequent year until the three-year program ends on January 8, 2030. ESU sales begin on September 1, 2026, and licenses are cumulative, so an organization joining in Year 2 must also pay for Year 1. The ESU offer doesn't apply to Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC, which remains in support until January 13, 2032. Organizations using a Microsoft cloud-based update service such as Intune or Autopatch can score a 25 percent discount, bringing the Year 1 price down to $45 per device. Everyone else pays full price through Volume Licensing or a Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider. Windows 10 has become the cockroach of IT over the last year. Free support for many versions ended in 2025, but despite Microsoft's attempts to stamp it out, it still accounts for just under 30 percent of the market, according to Statcounter's sample. In July, asset tracking service Lansweeper reported that 16.9 percent of the devices it monitored were running Windows 10 and that migration had slowed to a crawl. Those who could make the jump to Windows 11 had, and those who couldn't (or didn't want to) remained on the older operating system. There are multiple reasons for the refuseniks. Some specialist applications or hardware setups, including those used in healthcare, won't work with Windows 11. Then there are Windows 11's hardware requirements, which ruled out devices otherwise capable of running the operating system. Microsoft recently said it would optimize the code for systems with 8 GB of RAM, but that does nothing for machines excluded by its processor and TPM compatibility rules. Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021 bought organizations a few more years of updates without an ESU bill. That reprieve ends on January 12, 2027. ®

The City of Santa Cruz Parks & Recreation department began hosting blood drives earlier this year, with the plan to hold three to five annually. Annalise Bryant, the recreation supervisor who pitched the idea, says it is perfectly in line with the department’s core values — and given that the Red Cross has declared a national blood supply crisis, the timing is right.

If AI companies are collecting badges for "our model escaped the test environment," Meta just earned one. The Facebook parent company has confirmed that one of its AI models exploited a vulnerability in another organization's systems during a security evaluation, making it the third major AI developer in less than two weeks to disclose an agent wandering beyond its intended sandbox. The incident happened during testing carried out by AI security firm Irregular. Meta told the BBC that it reached the internet because of a "misconfiguration" in the evaluation environment, rather than a flaw in the model itself. The company said it's investigating and plans to publish more details once it has figured out exactly what happened. The admission comes as Meta rolls out Muse Code, its terminal-based coding agent, and arrives just days after OpenAI and Anthropic disclosed similar testing mishaps. OpenAI kicked things off by revealing that its agents compromised Hugging Face and other external systems during internal security testing. Anthropic then disclosed that Claude had reached three outside organizations after a configuration error exposed internet access that should not have been available. Meta isn't breaking much new ground with its explanation either. Like Anthropic before it, the company says the incident came down to a "misconfiguration" in the evaluation environment. Irregular, the AI security firm that tested both companies' models, told the BBC that Meta's incident was "the exact same evaluation-environment issue" Anthropic disclosed last week. None of the incidents involved consumer-facing AI suddenly going rogue. All occurred during security testing in which the models had access to offensive tools and command-line environments. Misconfigurations exposed the open internet in the Meta and Anthropic evaluations, while OpenAI's agents exploited their way through the test infrastructure until they found an internet-connected system. That hasn't prevented questions about both how frontier AI is being tested and why so many of these disclosures are arriving at once. Ilia Kolochenko, CEO of ImmuniWeb, said at least some of the incidents appear to be "part of a well-orchestrated marketing campaign" and argued that the reported "escapes" were simply the result of poorly isolated test environments rather than models independently breaking out of their sandboxes. Illumio's principal solution architect for EMEA, Alex Goller, also raised an eyebrow at the timing, telling The Register it "means it's a stunt or [Meta] wasn't paying enough attention during testing." “If the model has internet access, it's a bit like leaving the door open and being surprised when the cat walks out,” Goller added. Jake Moore, global cybersecurity advisor at ESET, was equally skeptical of Meta's disclosure, suggesting the company may have been trying to capitalize on the attention generated by similar incidents involving rival firms. "At best, this announcement feels like Meta trying to hitch its wagon to OpenAI's star after the Hugging Face incident," he told The Register. "At worst, it shows that none of the frontier AI firms or their partners have got a handle on their most powerful models, so every test puts organizations at risk." Meta, for its part, isn't saying much more yet. It has yet to identify the model involved, explain what was misconfigured, disclose which organization's systems were reached, or say whether any data was accessed. The company did not respond to The Register's questions. For now, the only thing spreading faster than AI agents appears to be stories about them escaping the lab. ®

The GOP’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” last year allocated $45 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to build and run camps to lock up immigrants—potentially more than 100,000 people on any given day. From Alligator Alcatraz to the Speedway Slammer, ICE camps (or camps run by for-profit corporations on behalf of ICE) have become a defining image of the Trump era—the most obvious physical manifestation of the fascistic forces that have taken over our government, and the functional linchpin of Trump’s immigration strategy. As John Washington writes in his new book, How to Close a Camp: Dispatches From the Fight Against Immigrant Detention: “All of the pomp and terror in the streets during Trump’s second administration—the prowling agents in military gear, the mass arrests, the stalking of schools and courtrooms—depends on the government having somewhere to detain the people they arrest.” 

It perhaps doesn’t need saying that Washington’s new book is timely. It’s interesting, then, that this timeliness is one of the themes that How to Close a Camp attempts to push back on. The author, a journalist, has spent years reporting on the horrors of immigration detention. So as much as the system has reached new heights of barbarity under Trump, Washington is deeply aware that the problem did not originate—and won’t end—with our current president. As with so many of today’s nightmares, Republican Ronald Reagan lit the spark for our modern camp system—one 1981 memo by his attorney general on the use of immigration detention as a means of deterrence warned that “the appearance of ‘concentration camps’ … may be publicly unacceptable.” But Democrat Bill Clinton poured gasoline on the fire. In 1994, there were fewer than 7,000 immigrants in detention on any given day. By 2001, that was up to 19,500 daily.

This detention build-out has remained a bipartisan project. It was Obama who appointed Tom Homan—who went on to serve as Trump’s notorious “border czar”—as ICE’s executive associate director of enforcement and removal operations in 2013; in 2015, he presented him with the Presidential Rank Award for Distinguished Service. That was the same year that ICE opened the 2,400-bed South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, which earned the nickname “baby jail”—the camp where Liam Conejo Ramos, the boy in the iconic blue bunny hat, was held after ICE kidnapped him in Minneapolis earlier this year. Washington spent a week in 2015 reporting on the children inside the Dilley camp, many of whom were not eating or sleeping, becoming depressed, and regressing. “Kids who don’t play, diapers on nine-year-olds,” he writes. “This is Clinton, Obama, and Biden’s immigration policy legacy: building out the camp infrastructure to humiliate, starve, abuse, and lay the groundwork for their virulently anti-immigrant successors.”

The goal of Washington’s book is to facilitate the closure of these camps, regardless of which party controls the White House. As its title implies, parts of How to Close a Camp constitute a literal how-to guide for activists, based on the author’s years covering grassroots campaigns to shut down ICE facilities, as well as numerous interviews with organizers who have been on the ground leading these fights in communities across the country.

The key, Washington stresses, is to understand that immigration detention camps “are not abstract federal machines.” Rather, they are entities with physical buildings and plots of land that require concrete services and contracts, zoning permits and tax breaks, licenses and utility hookups. “Every one of these nodes is a potential pressure point,” Washington advises. And he goes into detail on how activists should be thinking about each point of vulnerability.

The text here can get intensely practical. To give one example (of many), Washington ends a section on how a camp’s licensing schemes can be an entry point for direct action with the following checklist for organizers:

●      Identify all licenses held (state childcare, health, fire, safety, business, food services)
●      Research expiration dates and conditions for renewal
●      Track violations and whether provisional status is in effect
●      Publicize discrepancies between licensing requirements and actual conditions

Another section, which describes how permits and utilities can be pressure points, recommends these initial action steps:

●      Review local zoning maps and determine the property’s designated use
●      Monitor variance requests (These are public record.)
●      File public records requests for safety inspection results and permit applications
●      Challenge permits based on environmental, fire safety, or occupancy violations

For my part, I found the how-to portions of How to Close a Camp quite useful. Or, rather, I found myself wishing that I had had this book back in 2019, when I was helping to organize a campaign to shut down an ICE detention facility in my home state of Rhode Island. Throughout that fight, we rallied and held vigils, blocked entrances and took arrest, even got run over by a guard. But we didn’t pursue a systematic course of action like the one laid out in How to Close a Camp, and the facility we were targeting remains open today.

Local community groups and activists in Rhode Island are still protesting that camp—just last month saw another round of demonstrations after ICE detained a Providence man who has lived in Rhode Island for nearly 50 years and currently serves as the primary caregiver for his nine-year-old autistic son. But I haven’t been involved in the campaign for some time, other than occasionally showing up to an action.

And that, Washington writes, is precisely the challenge: “Closing a detention center is rarely a single strike. It’s a siege.” It requires bringing a range of different tactics to bear, often over an extended period of time. Each tool on its own is probably insufficient, but together they can make operating a camp “more expensive—both politically and financially—and ultimately untenable.”

That, as I know from my own failure to stick with our local camp closure campaign over the long haul, can require uncommon commitment. Which is why I think the most important part of How to Close a Camp is the case it makes that this fight, of all the overwhelming barrage of horrors and injustices we face in this moment, is worth such prioritization.

The core problem with this system is not the most extreme examples of its barbarity, but rather the fundamental existence of immigration detention at all.

Washington stresses a few points in particular to drive this message home. The hardest to read, of course, are the gut-wrenching stories of suffering and indignity experienced by the human beings caught up in this system: descriptions of human waste stagnating across a facility and detained people “resorting to desperate measures such as fasting in order to avoid defecating.” Examples of guards making hungry men eat with their hands shackled behind their backs—as one man said, “We had to bend over and eat off the chairs with our mouths, like dogs.”

But Washington is quick to remind us that the core problem with this system is not the most extreme examples of its barbarity but rather the fundamental existence of immigration detention at all. He urges readers not simply to oppose “a camp, not that camp, not a newly proposed camp or this particularly atrocious camp,” but rather to be against “camp as concept, against camp as practice—against all camps. Against locking people up because of where they were born or where they are.”

How to Close a Camp goes to great lengths to show that these structures do not just impact the people detained in them—they warp and degrade the realities of both the communities they inhabit and the people who fear ending up in them. Washington rebuts the false promises that get made to struggling towns about the economic development potential of these facilities, describing how, in reality, camps strain local services, suck up public resources, and create health risks for their neighbors. He also describes how they endanger the people around them. Immigrants in counties where ICE has the capacity to detain 50 people are more than twice as likely to be arrested than those in counties with no ICE camps. Immigrants in counties where ICE has at least 850 detention beds are six and a half times more likely to get arrested.

And that is not the only way a camp is a threat to those outside of it. Perhaps Washington’s most far-reaching point is that the camp poses a structural danger to our democracy. The thing about this form of detention is that it does not target someone because they committed a crime—rather, it targets someone because of who they are. And because it is—ostensibly—not designed to be punitive, the Supreme Court has ruled that it can be a mechanism for indefinite detention without the benefit of due process or trial by jury. In other words, the camp offers the state a profound loophole around our entire system of constitutional rights. And the populations targeted by this arbitrary system can shift and expand. ICE has already arrested hundreds of U.S. citizens (including dozens of children, two of whom had cancer). As Washington warns, “Once the infrastructure is built out, it is utilized.” How could such a system not grease the slippery slope to authoritarianism?

As Washington warns, “Once the infrastructure is built out, it is utilized.” How could such a system not grease the slippery slope to authoritarianism?

Ultimately, How to Close a Camp’s foundational argument is that “the first and crucial step to closing a camp is being against the camp.” And on this point, the work’s timeliness really does matter. At one point in the book, Washington describes a 1993 Department of Justice report on prison riots that noted that “most inmates most of the time accept as legitimate the imprisonment of their fellow inmates.… In uncommon periods in history, however, these beliefs may be challenged. Once it is held that the criteria for imprisonment are arbitrary, it is a short step to the belief that rebellion is justified.”

We may be living through one of those uncommon periods in history. The cartoonish cruelty, corruption, and arbitrariness of the Trump administration’s approach to immigration detention has opened millions of Americans’ minds to the possibility that, just maybe, the very premise of the camp—that it is OK to imprison people simply because they were compelled to move to our country from somewhere else—is irredeemably arbitrary. How to Close a Camp is a powerful tool for helping readers take that last short step from this realization to rebellion.

The first evidence of the sledgehammer the new Trump administration would take to America’s anti-corruption policies came just two weeks into his second term. The new attorney general, Pam Bondi, unveiled a series of memos outlining the Department of Justice’s new priorities. Unsurprisingly, in a White House overseen by the first white-collar criminal ever elected to the presidency, Bondi’s department revealed that it was decimating many of the key planks of the anti-bribery, anti-kleptocracy regime it had built out over the years—some of which were on the books since before Trump was even born.

The first on Bondi’s chopping block was a statute known as the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). First enacted in the late 1930s, FARA was a relatively simple piece of regulation, requiring transparency among Americans lobbying on behalf of foreign regimes. FARA didn’t block the practice; thanks to First Amendment protections, Americans had wide leeway when it came to who they could lobby for—who they could spin, who they could whitewash, who they could open doors in Washington and around the country for.

For decades, FARA was itself a backwater, largely unenforced and almost entirely overlooked. That disuse allowed the foreign lobbying industry—which now comprised not just traditional lobbying shops, but also PR professionals, consultancies, white-shoe law firms, think tanks, and many more—to blossom into a multibillion-dollar behemoth, flipping into the go-to tool for foreign dictatorships looking to tilt American policy however they wanted. Following Trump’s first election, which elevated foreign lobbyists to more political power than they’d ever seen prior, FARA saw new life. Prosecutors went after foreign lobbyist after foreign lobbyist, from Trump’s campaign director to his national security adviser to many more, landing guilty pleas or outright convictions, and forcing much of the industry into the light for the first time.

Nor was this a partisan pursuit; in 2024, then-Senator Bob Menendez was found guilty for, among other things, secretly moonlighting as an agent of the military dictatorship in Egypt—for “conspiring to act as a foreign agent” on behalf of Cairo, lobbying his congressional colleagues and ghost-writing for his dictator clients, all in return for gold bars that Menendez hid around his house.

By the early 2020s, FARA was finally relevant, arguably for the first time ever. And then Bondi came in, and announced those days were done. FARA would still remain on the books, but Bondi—who herself had once worked as a foreign lobbyist for the theocratic dictatorship in Qatar—announced that it would focus solely on lobbying crimes that were “similar to more traditional espionage.” It’s unclear what Bondi was talking about; not only does the US already have separate legislation targeting espionage, but FARA has nothing to do with spying. It is instead meant to specifically shine light on the subterranean lobbying networks operating in the shadows around Washington—how foreign regimes, foreign oligarchs, and many others push for their preferred policies, from lifting sanctions to ending corruption investigations to even launching wars.

But now, thanks to Trump, it was a nonstarter. Where FARA had once been the lodestar for foreign lobbying legislation around the world, Bondi announced that it was now effectively dead—and all that information and transparency that Americans once had access to would be no more.

In another memo, Bondi declared that the Trump administration was also dissolving another prong of the US’s fight against kleptocracy: the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force. First created in 2017—during Trump’s first term, ironically—the group had quickly transformed into the US’s leading tool for tracking and tracing foreign influence campaigns around the country, dedicated to dismantling infiltration campaigns out of places like Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, and more. Given the explosion in interference campaigns in recent years, the FBI’s task force had only grown in import since its inception. Bondi announced its elimination, killing off the US’s only body dedicated to investigating foreign influence.

Next on the chopping block was the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative. Inaugurated in 2010, this was a body dedicated to freezing, seizing, and repatriating assets linked to dirty money networks around the world, who often plowed their illicit wealth directly into the US. While this task force was always fighting an uphill battle—the millions it returned hardly compared to the billions (or more) pilfered around the world—it nonetheless stood as a testament to the US’s public willingness to go after these networks. In Nigeria, in Malaysia, in Uzbekistan—in country after country, this body helped return some of the looted wealth, and helped restore some of the US’s mangled credibility in the fight against dirty money. And now, with the stroke of a pen, it was gone.

Bondi’s scythe continued on. She announced the US was also eliminating another task force dedicated specifically to oligarchs’ assets. Known as KleptoCapture, the relatively new initiative grew out of Russia’s expanded invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and out of the realization that oligarchs in Russia and elsewhere were simply prongs of kleptocratic governments across the globe. Yachts, mansions, luxury jets, priceless artwork, armadas of high-end automobiles—it was all fair game for KleptoCapture. If they could identify the proceeds of illicit wealth—especially linked to those closest to the Kremlin—they could swipe it, and help close off the American economy to Russian influence that much further. That was the case, at least, until early 2025, when the Trump administration destroyed it outright.

These are all a jumble of names and acronyms, neologisms unfamiliar to those outside Washington. But pulling back, one thing from Bondi’s memos was clear: In a single day, just a few weeks into Trump’s new administration, the US had eliminated or kneecapped its most successful and most prominent counter-kleptocracy tools. Years of progress had been undone. Decades of legislation had been left for dead. The American economy was suddenly opening itself up for illicit wealth, for foreign influence, for kleptocratic regimes writ large in a way it never had prior. Oligarchs around the world watched how their counterparts in America had pried open a White House, and suddenly realized that they could do the same. That they could join in the fun—join in this feast of making white-collar crime great again.

And the best was yet to come.

As the dust settled on Bondi’s memos, Trump himself took up his pen—quite literally. Busy shaking down American media outfits, strong-arming American universities, and authoring the most authoritarian administration the country had seen at least since the days of Richard Nixon, Trump turned to dismantling America’s remaining anti-corruption credentials. Where he’d previously danced around and badmouthed America’s anti-kleptocracy toolkit, now he would destroy it wholesale.

His first target was the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), which had itself been a direct outgrowth of Nixon’s rank corruption. Trump openly described the FCPA, the very bedrock of America’s anti-corruption efforts, as a “horrible law.” To Trump, the FCPA wrongly blocked American companies from engaging in the kind of routine, high-level bribery firms elsewhere practiced. Rather than a shield that protected American corporations from being themselves targeted by rapacious regimes, and rather than a tool that helped starve dictatorships of much-needed cash, Trump thought the FCPA was a “horror show” for the US.

In an executive order, Trump garroted the FCPA entirely. He announced that all enforcement of the legislation was effectively dead, restoring “American economic competitiveness” and allowing American companies to once more engage in “routine business practices in other nations”—a handy euphemism for bribery. Foreign corruption, in other words, was once more back on the table. Kleptocratic regimes and crooked American businessmen around the world rejoiced, knowing they wouldn’t have to worry about pesky prosecutions anymore. One of the greatest post-Watergate reforms was now dead, for all to see.

But Trump also had something more recent in his sights. In 2021, the US passed the country’s first shell company registry. It was the single most important tool in ending the US’s role as a global leader in creating anonymous shell companies. Without anonymous shell companies in the US, oligarchs and dictators would have far more difficult times building out their own kleptocratic networks, hiding their ill-gotten gains in American real estate, American private equity, American investments, and more.

In 2024, the registry—a private database, accessible only to American officials—finally came online. It was a remarkable moment. For the first time in decades, America’s best days as a titan of the offshore world were behind it.

And then, in early March 2025, Trump destroyed all that progress. Describing the shell company legislation as a “Biden rule”—and ignoring the fact that it was a bipartisan bill, passed over Trump’s veto—Trump claimed the new regulations had “been an absolute disaster” for small businesses. “The economic menace of [shell company] reporting will soon be no more,” he wrote.

Trump himself was, of course, no stranger to anonymous shell companies. His own real estate portfolio was drenched in them, hiding all manner of international financing networks long before he ever ascended to the presidency. Given that Trump, with his background as a luxury real estate magnate, was the first American leader to emerge from an industry reliant on anonymous shell company financing, it was perhaps unsurprising that he raced to the rescue of shell corporations. Still, the announcement was a shock; not only did fentanyl dealers, cartel heads, Chinese laundering networks, Iranian arms exporters, and more—the kinds of groups Trump was nominally opposed to—rely on these kinds of shells, but law enforcement bodies around the country were broadly supportive of shell company transparency.

Trump, though, couldn’t have cared less. As his Treasury Department said, it would no longer “enforce any penalties or fines” for American shell companies who didn’t comply with the regulations. The legislation would still remain, at least on paper. But in the real world, it would be like America’s greatest counter-kleptocracy tool had never existed. Even worse: Trump’s White House announced it would torch all the shell company data the federal government had already gathered—a collective bonfire, destroying all the corporate records shining light on American shell companies. (For good measure, the Trump White House shortly afterward announced it would also gut proposed anti–money laundering rules for things like private equity and hedge funds, meaning they, too, could continue accepting as much dirty money from around the world as they wanted.)

Trump’s actions were, in a certain sense, breathtaking. Rather than trying to repeal all these pieces of legislation outright, Trump had discovered a workaround—a legislative loophole that allowed him to decide which laws his administration would enforce, and which ones they could effectively demolish. Rather than uphold his constitutional duty to make sure that all laws passed by Congress were “faithfully executed,” Trump simply announced that there was a whole suite of legislation that folks no longer needed to worry about. He had created a new legal architecture by fiat, providing a public road map for as much white-collar crime as crooked regimes and corrupt oligarchs could want.

And still, he wasn’t done. While he was busy dismantling legislation, he was also busy creating new ways to attract illicit wealth into the US. One of his new tools was the creation of a so-called “gold card” visa scheme. Sitting in the Oval Office, Trump hawked a “path to citizenship” for anyone who could pay $5 million. Anyone—any drug lord, any human rights abuser, any oligarch around the world—who could meet that fee could visit the US, setting them on a path to American citizenship. “They’ll be wealthy and they’ll be successful, and they’ll be spending a lot of money and paying a lot of taxes and employing a lot of people, and we think it’s going to be extremely successful,” Trump said. For good measure, he held up a physical gold card for reporters to see—complete with his face, his scrawl, and the trump card emblazoned on its front.

These kinds of “golden visa” schemes aren’t novel. They’ve been a favorite tool of kleptocrats around the world, looking to purchase citizenship in offshore havens like Dominica, Malta, or Cyprus for years. They’re the perfect tools for figures looking for an escape hatch, dodging investigations or arrest alike. The US had its own related version of this years ago, but in 2022 legislators passed much-needed reforms to patch up those money-laundering loopholes. Trump, though, simply ignored those regulations. He wasn’t even coy about who he was trying to entice back into the US; when asked specifically about whether Russian oligarchs could obtain this “gold card” visa, Trump responded, “Yeah, possible. Hey, I know some Russian oligarchs that are very nice people.”

A few months later, this new Trump gold card scheme launched. The price had dropped: now, for only $1 million, anyone could “[u]nlock life in America.” American residency—and eventual citizenship—was now for sale, to anyone who could scrounge up the cash. Kleptocrats couldn’t have asked for more.

This essay is adapted from United States of Oligarchy: How America’s Wealthiest Ally With Dictators, Weaken the U.S., and Destroy Democracy by Casey Michel (Macmillan Publishers).

There’s no media outlet more hated by the current Israeli government, nor heralded outside Israel, than Haaretz, the longest-running newspaper currently in print in the country (indeed, it was founded long before the country was). Inside Israel, Haaretz—the word means “the land” or “the earth”—is seen as the paper of the educated elite, a small slice of the population, while its English-language website has more than 2.5 million unique monthly visitors. It’s a must read for diplomats, foreign journalists, and followers of Israeli politics (the paper is currently expanding its US/English language bureau). 

Founded in 1918 as a literary newspaper by the Hebrew battalions of the British Army in Egypt, it was established as a general newspaper a year later. “Since then, for 108 years, it’s been published every day and hour,” editor in chief Aluf Benn told me when I sat with him in the paper’s Tel Aviv headquarters recently. 

Benn, 61, has been at its helm for the last 15 years, following his more than two decades as the paper’s national security and diplomatic correspondent. Born and raised in Tel Aviv (his father was one of Israel’s most prominent poets and literary figures), he is confident, warm, and informal. We met in Haaretz’s South Tel Aviv headquarters, among warehouses in a part of town fast becoming gentrified, in the Schocken Building, named for Amos Schocken, who owns 75 percent of the paper and whose family has shepherded it since 1935. The other 25 percent is owned by liberal Russian businessman and Putin enemy, Leonid Nevzlin, who is an Israeli citizen. The paper’s hallways are famously laden with contemporary, often provocative, Israeli artwork, art collecting being the other obsession of publisher Schocken. 

Haaretz’s unique place in Israeli political culture is amplified daily, especially since the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, when self-imposed censorship by the rest of the Israeli media took hold. “We were the only ones in the Hebrew mainstream media reporting on what was happening in Gaza and Lebanon,” Benn noted. “About starvation, killing, destruction, war crimes, shooting people on their way to get food, maimed and crippled and wounded and dead and widowed and bereaved and orphaned families and people.”  

Indeed, this reporting hasn’t stopped. Haaretz reporter Nir Hasson can’t get into Gaza since Israel still won’t allow reporters inside without an official IDF escort, but he maintains contacts with sources via phone and Zoom from his home in Jerusalem. He had a story recently that was simply names and photos of Gazan children killed since the ceasefire.

“I think that this [Gaza coverage is] one of the most important journalistic things that we did,” Benn says. “You could always argue that it’s not enough. It was not enough to change public perception in Israel. But clearly, when the government goes against us, when people criticize us, it’s because of that reporting.… We gave names and faces to dead Palestinian children, or to hungry Palestinian people, sick people who could not get treatment.”

He continued: “We obviously reported more about the Israeli side. We’re not some external force dividing attention between the two sides. But you cannot cover a war by one side.” The rest of the Israeli media, though, ignored Palestinian suffering almost completely, despite there being no government censorship. 

“The bombs Israel dropped on Gaza happened 50 miles away from here,” he noted. “We could hear it … in Tel Aviv, the bombing in Gaza. It’s not something that happened in outer space. But it was not reported…. Most Israelis don’t want to hear about it.” 

Indeed, Haaretz, to its immense credit, consistently invests significant reporting not only in covering Gaza but the West Bank as well. Occasionally, and ironically, its reporters get boycotted outside of the region (for instance, the Columbia University encampment leaders refused to give the paper an interview), but Gazan and West Bank Palestinians talk to the paper regularly. They’ve also developed a reporting team of Palestinian citizens of Israel who speak fluent Arabic. “It’s not just about the language; it’s about their ability to communicate on a much more equal basis,” Benn said. 

These days, Haaretz invests in open-source and video reporting, and recently established a cybersecurity, technology, and open-source investigation desk—four reporters Benn calls the “secret service.” Even as I was writing this story, Haaretz’s imaging research revealed misinformation from the Israeli government regarding placement of troops and Israeli resources nearly a mile past the official demarcation line inside Gaza. This method is used by the paper in the West Bank too, identifying new settlement growth instigated by the government, even though reporters can roam freely there. 

With the Netanyahu government taking frequent aim at what it considers the cultural elites in the media, Haaretz and other outlets have become targets—sometimes literally. In July, there were three attacks by a masked man hauling a brick, two on the headquarters of TV Channel 12 and one on Haaretz’s headquarters. Even after the alleged perpetrator was caught there was no government condemnation. No surprise there.

The government’s attacks on Haaretz continue. A government lawyer successfully just argued that new billboards sponsored by Haaretz and promoting a free press as a prerequisite for democracy be removed as “electioneering.” After the war in Gaza began, the government, led by Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi, “started talking about the need to boycott us because we’re collaborators of Hamas.… They stopped the residual government advertising. They also told their government employees that they will not pay for the subscriptions any longer.” Haaretz hasn’t been barred from any press gaggles, but that is rather a moot point since Netanyahu has none. 

“Today the freedom of the press in Israel is basically defended by two institutions: the attorney general, who is the strongest voice for democracy, at least within the Green Line … and the Supreme Court,” said Benn, though he acknowledged that, due to recent appointments, “the Supreme Court is going further and further to the right.”  

Indeed, in early July, a right-wing high court judge proclaimed that anyone who called Israel an “apartheid” state should be denied entry to Israel. Benn: “That was shocking, actually.… At some point, since we do write these words, they might come back and try to fight us seriously. So there is a risk. They don’t want us to be here.” 

Benn, the erstwhile diplomatic correspondent, remains a keen observer of how Israel is seen globally and especially in the United States, where Haaretz also has its largest English-language readership. Just as the right-wing government in Israel hates it, liberals consider the paper a necessary read. Those on the Israeli right blame Haaretz’s thorough reporting for some of Israel’s bad image. But Benn knows that newspapers report the news; they don’t create it. “Israel’s image can be fixed if it changes direction towards a serious effort at peacemaking with the Palestinians toward a two-state solution, with Syria and Lebanon,” he said.

While many in the Jewish community in the U.S. are especially concerned about diminishing support for Israel in the Democratic Party, Benn asserted that Israel’s image problem is, for now, in both parties: “Both sides of the American aisle hate its continuous war policy.” Regarding the stranglehold on Israeli democracy that is so prevalent on the minds of Benn and his readers, he concludes that “Israel’s domestic crisis matters less to Americans, especially to Republicans who support similar autocratic policies as Netanyahu’s.”

Back on the domestic front: There is no doubt that in October, Israel is facing arguably the most consequential election of its history. Existential issues like democracy—not only for the Jewish people of Israel, but for the Palestinian people—will lie before the next prime minister.  

Whoever wins the upcoming Israeli election will face monumental issues left by this current government that will impact Israel greatly on the world stage, not just in America. “One of the biggest challenges for any future govern in Israel would be whether to make Bibi the scapegoat for whatever Israel did wrong in the eyes of the world,” Benn says. “That includes dealing with his poisonous legacies—the occupied lands in Gaza, Syria, and Lebanon, and West Bank ethnic cleansing and Jewish terror.”

Additionally, and perhaps most ominously, the current government has instituted the death penalty for the first time in the history of Israel (except for the execution of nazi leader Adolf Eichman) at the urging of far-right Minister Ben Gvir. This inhumane law (being contested presently in the courts), activates the death penalty only for Palestinian perpetrators of terror, not those who are Jewish. Once there will be trials for the October 7 Hamas perpetrators currently in Israeli prisons, there could be hundreds of death penalties issued, with dire consequences for Israel’s image, despite the heinous crimes committed on that day.

Indeed, the next prime minister will be handed a profoundly difficult mess to unravel. But what happens if Netanyahu wins reelection? “It’s going to be a flood,” Benn says. “Because at some point they would be able to turn the Supreme Court even more to the right. The Attorney General would leave. She’s not there indefinitely. But at the end of the day, clearly, this is the country that they want to build. A country where it would be impossible to replace the government, where criticism of policy like apartheid would be illegal, where the press would look like a government mouthpiece.”  

Israeli polls increasingly point to a very close election, with Netanyahu for the time being trailing an alliance led by former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot. Yet Benn is wary, admitting that he is “in a minority position among my peers here who argue that there’s no way for Netanyahu to survive the election.” Indeed, there’s fear that Netanyahu could make ample use of his security services to maintain indefinite power. Additionally, a stalemate election could find Netanyahu governing without a mandate with near dictatorial means. “I’m afraid that he could stay on because he doesn’t need to win decisively with this coalition as he did last time,” Benn says. 

He bemoans the Israel he was raised in; the Israel his parents helped create. “We grew up believing in liberal values and lifestyles like science and technology. We never realized the lesson of, I hate these analogies, but the lesson of the 1930s throughout Europe and the United States was that it can be turned back. The same was true about the peace process. We thought that these things were irreversible. Well, they’re not exactly reversible, but they could take a very bad turn as we see in Gaza and in Lebanon and even in the West Bank, where the Palestinian Authority is just a prisoner of COGAT (the Israeli military civil administration), basically, and there’s no money going in; it’s just atrophied there. 

“I think this goes back to our mission at Haaretz. You always need to be on watch and guard and try to protect these liberal values of democracy, freedom of speech, civil rights, human rights, and not look the other way, even in wartime.” 

Benn has a particular litmus test for Israeli democracy. He tells me about an article from 2022 that foreshadowed what Netanyahu has done regarding the implosion of Israeli democracy—with his attacks on the Supreme Court, the Attorney General, the media, culture, corruption—in his current term, which would no doubt intensify in another. He wonders: “Will this article still be publishable after the election if it ushers in a right-wing government led by Netanyahu, Smotrich, and Ben-Gvir? All signs indicate that this trio is plotting to turn Israel into an authoritarian state in which criticizing the government or replacing it will only be a pipe dream. Well, it could, and it still can, but it’s becoming more difficult.” 

The article was a frontal attack on an Israeli government that indeed has ruled for the last four years. It was written by Benn.

At 8:15 on the morning of August 6, 1945, Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a minister who presided over a Methodist church in Hiroshima, was two miles outside the city, when a tremendous flash occurred in the sky. Uninjured by the blast, he rushed toward his home and his family, passing hordes of the dead and the gravely wounded—people severely burnt, some holding their eyeballs in their hands—and scenes of horrific devastation, as an immense conflagration consumed his city. He didn’t know what had happened. No one did. This level of destruction was incomprehensible. Tanimoto also couldn’t know at that moment, as he feared for his wife, young daughter, and his parishioners, that he would become one of the best-known survivors of this first act of nuclear warfare and devote the rest of his life to preventing a recurrence of such a hellish catastrophe.

Though I never met Tanimoto, I feel as if I know him. That’s because about two years ago, I was asked to edit his poignant and gripping memoir of that horrible day and the weeks and months that followed, an account that had been lost for decades. Today, the book is being published by Random House’s Modern Library under the title Hiroshima, 8:15: The Lost Memoir.  It’s a harrowing tale of the atomic bombing from ground zero and details the heroic action—though Tanimoto never called it that—he took to ferry the wounded across a river, using a small boat he found and only a pole to push it along, so these victims might find medical attention. As the city burned and he tended to survivors who had lost much of their flesh—many would not live long—he kept repeating to himself, “These are human beings.” The horror was numbing. An eyewitness later called Tanimoto a “rescuing angel.”

Kai Bird, a co-author of American Prometheus, the biography that inspired Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer, praises Tanimoto’s work as a “stunning historical discovery and a heartrending testimony of human suffering.” Tanimoto bore witness to one of the most significant days in human history, and his remembrances—as gruesome and disturbing as they are—ought to be read by all.

My involvement in bringing his memoir to the public began with a trip I took to Japan two years ago. Early in my journalism career, I focused on arms control and nuclear proliferation issues—and then moved on to other topics after a year or two of having nightmares about nuclear attacks. In Japan, I felt compelled to visit Hiroshima, where I was moved by how the city had rebuilt, creating a Peace Park at its center, and dedicating itself to the abolition of nuclear weapons. The memorials to the estimated 140,000 killed by the atomic bomb were inspiring because they were free of bitterness and promoted a never-again message.

Upon my return to the United States, I wrote an essay for this newsletter, in which I observed, “Hiroshima is certainly a reminder that we live in a world imperiled by nuclear arsenals and that we have yet to fully address that danger—and that human cruelty can be excessive and that the total annihilation of human civilization remains a possibility. But the city’s commemoration of the tragedy has a beautiful side.”

A few months later, I was contacted by Donald Rosenfeld, a veteran film producer who as a young man was president of Merchant Ivory Productions (Howards End, A Room with a View, Jefferson in Paris, The Remains of the Day). He informed me he was currently developing a feature film dramatizing one of the greatest journalistic feats of the 20th century: John Hersey’s article on Hiroshima published by the New Yorker a year after the bomb was dropped.

This 30,000-word account—written after Hersey visited the devastated city—consumed a full issue of the magazine and was the first comprehensive depiction in Western media of what happened to the residents of Hiroshima that day, as well as how they were affected by radiation poisoning in the months afterward. For a year, the media had generally shied away from fully describing what had befallen the people of Hiroshima, and the military had downplayed—even dismissed—the injuries and deaths resulting from the bomb’s radiation. The American public had mostly been exposed to images of rubble, not photographs or accounts that showed the pain and suffering of the civilian victims.

The coverage was incomplete—or sanitized—for a variety of reasons. The US military, then occupying Japan, controlled access to the city and was not keen to have reports on the gruesome effects of the bomb, and anti-Japanese racism and antipathy toward a WWII enemy inhibited sympathy for those vaporized, crushed, or wounded in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Hersey changed all this. His article, which would soon be a bestselling book, told the separate stories of six Hiroshima residents who had survived. The piece recreated the day from each of their vantages—a just-the-facts recounting of the horror, no adjectives. His intent was to let readers envision what would happen to them and their loved ones if their city or town were hit by an atomic bomb. One of the six witnesses was Tanimoto.

Hersey’s work was an instant phenomenon. The issue sold out. His article prompted stories in newspapers and magazines around the globe. It was serialized on the radio. Albert Einstein asked the New Yorker for a thousand copies that he could distribute. But no copies were left. Hersey made the world see—and understand—what an atomic blast truly did. It was one of the most consequential acts of journalism in modern history. Already a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and much-acclaimed war correspondent—he was only 32—Hersey went on to a long and illustrious career as a journalist and writer. He died in 1993.

Rosenfeld was looking to make a movie covering Hersey’s pursuit of the Hiroshima story—there are twists and turns to the tale—and he asked if I wanted to be part of the project. Of course, I did. While we were figuring out my role in this endeavor—I read an early script and gave notes—he informed me that among Hersey’s papers stored at Yale University was a 221-page manuscript in English that Tanimoto had written in 1947 chronicling his experiences in Hiroshima. It was a more detailed accounting than what had appeared in Hersey’s article, told from the Japanese minister’s distinct perspective. At some point, Tanimoto, who passed away in 1986, had sent the typewritten manuscript to Hersey, and for years it had sat in a folder in a box. Tanimoto’s own family did not know it existed. Only a few researchers and scholars had come across it, and then Hersey’s grandson, Cannon Hersey, spotted the manuscript in late 2022.

As a side project to the Hersey film, Rosenfeld hoped to publish Tanimoto’s memoir. He asked if I would edit it and compose an introduction. I immediately said yes. What an honor it would be to help bring Tanimoto’s story to the public. Rosenfeld’s aim was to try to find a publisher for the memoir, but if that failed, he had a small publishing company of his own that could publish the work. I didn’t foresee huge market potential for the memoir but believed it would be a good deed to turn this forgotten manuscript into a book, no matter what happened after that.

So as the second Trump administration began, I found an escape from that chaos in editing Tanimoto’s terrifying reminiscences of August 6, 1945, and the months afterward, during which he contended with severe health problems, strove to rebuild his church, and headed toward what would be a decades-long career as an international peace activist.

Tanimoto had studied at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta prior to World War II and knew English. But passages in the memoir were written in a stiff English, some tough to understand. The manuscript included loads of details about routine church affairs. My goal was to make his memoir readable so this act of witnessing would have a chance to reach a wide audience. I dug up old maps of Hiroshima to check the names of streets, neighborhoods, rivers, and other geographic features. (In the memoir, Tanimoto notes his spelling skills were lacking.) I had to make sense of sections with confusing chronologies.

I did what editors do—and preserved Tanimoto’s straightforward recounting of the apocalyptic scenes he experienced, his rescue efforts, the many tragedies he saw, and the hardships he and other Hiroshima residents endured long after the bombing. In his memoir, he contemplated the morality of the nuclear attack—without bearing any ill will against the Americans—and its impact on human society. He described how he came to see his duty to spread the Christian faith as intertwined with his mission to prevent any more atomic bombings. As I note in an introduction to the book—which serves as a biography of Tanimoto and covers his long-lasting relationship with Hersey—Tanimoto encountered many travails as an antinuclear campaigner. His projects did not always pan out. But he stayed true to this cause until his last days.

Tanimoto’s memoir is more than a historical document. It’s a warning that the existential threat posed by the nuclear arsenals held by nine nations remains. We all live in peril, and human extinction—and global destruction—is only a few bad decisions away. That prospect is hard to grasp and absorb into our daily lives. As did Hersey, Tanimoto shows us the ghastly and inescapable reality of nuclear war—an alert that cannot be sounded often enough. The editors at Modern Library agreed. They acquired the memoir and are now enthusiastically promoting it widely.

As for the Hersey movie, the project is moving forward. Director Phil Joanou has written a script, and Rosenfeld is lining up financing. Tanimoto is a main character in the film, which, if it comes to be made, will further spread his crucial testimony. Until then, this book will share the simple but profound message to which he devoted his life: Do not forget.

In a moving foreword, his 81-year-old daughter, Koko Tanimoto Kondo, who as an infant survived the bombing because her mother managed to push her through an opening in the burning wreckage of their home that had collapsed on them, writes, “Human memory is fragile. It’s so convenient to forget unpleasant things, much easier than facing them. But if nuclear weapons are never used again, it will only be because of the memory of what happened to the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. My father was one of the first to understand this clearly.” Tanimoto spent decades prodding people and governments throughout the world to not permit the memory of Hiroshima to fade. With this book, he is still reminding us.

Here’s an excerpt from the book.

As health coverage becomes more uncertain, Santa Cruz County’s community health providers are doubling down on what works: partnership, write six healthcare safety net leaders. When a pregnant patient at Santa Cruz Community Health needed dental care, Dientes Community Dental Care was ready next door — one example of how Salud Para La Gente, Santa Cruz County Health Centers, Janus of Santa Cruz, Encompass Community Services and Dientes work together to close gaps in care. All will participate at Friday’s Community Health Resource Fair and Breastfeeding Walk in Watsonville. The authors encourage community members to attend and discover the services and support available to them and their families.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation appears to have let its most acerbic writers loose on its latest results announcement, in which certain AI companies are branded "crass kleptomaniacs." CEO Robert Thomson used his prepared remarks to point out that if it weren't for all the quality content from News Corp, "users would be drowning in a slimy sea of AI slop." "We have trusted content relationships with OpenAI and Meta, and are in advanced discussions with several other companies," he added, before issuing a warning. "Under our woo and sue approach, we are taking aggressive action against those who pilfer and profit from our work. We will pursue those pilferers, and companies that are clients of these crass kleptomaniacs should know they are patently in possession of stolen goods." Thomson was just getting warmed up. He accused browser maker Brave, which he described as "a company brave in name only," of having "shamelessly stolen our content at scale" and of having "illegally, gormlessly sourced and repurposed copyrighted material for sale to third-party businesses." "Their scheming started with masked web crawlers scanning our pages to ingest copyrighted articles and continued when they repackaged those stolen files and delivered near verbatim copies to enterprise customers, undermining legitimate content commerce and the very concept of creativity." The CEO suggested the legal blast radius of such actions could be wide. "We expect our lawsuits to highlight and halt the murky, illegal behavior of AI companies who steal and flagrantly fence our precious IP," he said. "Unfortunately, some of the world's better-known companies are clients of these crass kleptomaniacs." He had kinder adjectives for companies that pay for News Corp's content, describing them as "principled" and "honorable." The CEO said the company has "more deals to come, and hopefully not too much litigation," and hailed Meta and OpenAI for setting "benchmarks that other principled companies should follow." News Corp is not alone in accusing AI companies of taking its work: authors have filed several lawsuits alleging that their books were used to train LLMs without permission or compensation. Anthropic agreed to establish a $1.5 billion settlement fund to resolve one such case. During the question-and-answer section of the earnings call, Thomson praised the company's realtor.com property site for "building proprietary IP that no AI engine can legally scrape." "No buyer or seller or agent wants housing hallucinations," he said. Nor does News Corp. Its Digital Real Estate Services segment was its fastest-growing business, with annual revenue jumping 12 percent to $1.8 billion. Across News Corp as a whole, full-year revenue reached $9.03 billion, up 7 percent. The company didn't break out revenue from OpenAI and Meta, but Thomson said News Corp's deals with them "are not merely transactional arrangements." "They are savvy distributors. Our inputs are crucial components of their outputs. As for litigation, it's far from over," he said. The old advice was never to argue with people who buy ink by the barrel. Legacy media may have lost some of its clout, but Thomson's remarks suggest News Corp has lost none of its appetite for a fight. The company also has form when campaigning against perceived foes and critics: a recent book attempts to distill its methods. ®

Democrats just nominated left-wing populist Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Senate race. Yet his victory was razor close, suggesting he faces big challenges ahead. What’s his theory of the case? In his victory speech and in remarks to reporters, El-Sayed offered clues. He described Trumpism as a fusion of the “worst” of neoconservatism and of MAGA, an apt description of the horrors Trump has created. He cast his GOP opponent as a Trump bootlicker, essentially saying this is what Trump demands of his party. And he juxtaposed Trumpism with the ethnic diversity of his coalition and with the immigrant heritage of himself and his children, an effective indictment of Trumpian white-nationalism. Is this enough? We talked to Ron Brownstein, senior political analyst at CNN and columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. We discuss El-Sayed’s many challenges in the general, how he absolutely can assemble a winning coalition, and what he’s learned from Barack Obama’s understanding of American politics. Listen to this episode here.

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for its newsletters.

The Trump administration appears poised to gut the central policies that shape Head Start, a popular and long-established early childhood education program that serves the country’s neediest children, including thousands in California.

The federal Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs posted a notice that it intends to “significantly reduce regulatory requirements” for Head Start, effectively stripping the program of the unique features that have defined it since its creation in the mid-1960s. 

The announcement came in late May and will likely go through a review process before becoming official in 2027.

The agency doesn’t specify what exactly it plans to cut, but reports indicate that it could be most of the program’s standards and guidelines. That could include low student-to-teacher ratios, minimum teacher qualifications, and stipulations that Head Start accept all income-eligible children regardless of whether they’re disabled or if their parents are citizens. 

The agency also suggested it wants to shift Head Start funding to the states, although it didn’t specify how or when this would happen.

“The complete gutting of these goals ignores what we know really works in early childhood education,” said Deborah Stipek, a former dean of the Stanford School of Education who’s researched the topic. “If you’re going to spend money on something, wouldn’t you want it to have positive effects?”

The agency said in its announcement it expects the cuts to be “well-received by Head Start programs, since they will welcome reduced [administrative] burden and increased flexibility.”

It also said it would allow local Head Start programs to keep policies that “best address the needs of their communities.” But individual Head Start programs are unlikely to comply with standards that aren’t required, particularly if they’re facing pressure to serve more students, said Melanee Cottrill, executive director of Head Start California, a nonprofit that advocates for California’s 1,813 Head Start centers.

In the same announcement, the agency said it also planned to boost the nutrition and physical exercise components of Head Start, but didn’t offer further details. 

‘It will be very different’

So far, Head Start has evaded major budget cuts, and the federal government doesn’t appear poised to slash funding now. A handful of California Head Start programs shuttered during the government shutdown last fall, but reopened when legislators returned to work.

But a reduction in standards would, eventually, have a significant impact, Cottrill said. It’s likely Head Start will have less qualified teachers, larger class sizes and fewer opportunities for parent involvement, she said.

“Those standards are what make Head Start a high quality program,” Cottrill said. “Head Start will still exist, but it will be very different from what it is today.”

Head Start, launched in 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, is a federal childcare program that serves the country’s lowest-income families – those earning less than $33,000 a year for a family of four. The federal government issues grants directly to school districts, nonprofits or other organizations that run Head Start programs, sometimes in combination with other funding sources.

Head Start offers health screenings, meals, curriculum focused on literacy and math, and resources for parents such as parenting classes. Children who attend Head Start are more likely to go to college and hold professional jobs later in life, a 2022 study found.

In California, about 70,000 children are enrolled in Head Start. The number would be higher but programs have had to turn away families because they struggled to hire staff. Early childhood educators sometimes earn less than fast-food workers and turnover is high, Cottrill noted. 

Cost of losing disability screening

One Head Start standard that could be especially costly to eliminate is disability screening. Identifying and addressing disabilities such as dyslexia early can reduce the need for special education later on, potentially saving thousands of dollars, Stipek said.

Beth Meloy, an early childhood education consultant who worked on the federal government’s Head Start standards, said that simplifying and streamlining the standards is probably a good idea. Navigating too many standards may be overly burdensome for some local Head Start programs, she said.

But gutting them entirely would be a disaster, she said.

“Head Start is built around a mission of giving low-income children a path to sustained education and life outcomes,” Meloy said. “These changes lack the thoughtfulness that these children deserve.”

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Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich has taken a break from the cloud to turn Paint into a monitor for Doom, using the Windows clipboard as plumbing. Dubbed "MS Paint Doom" or "DoomPaint" – either will work – the project is the product of a spare-time experiment. To be clear, Microsoft Paint isn't doing anything other than serving as a place to paste from the game. As Russinovich observed: "Paint renders the game but does not compute it. Paint computes nothing. Paint has never computed anything. That's the joke." The result is as enjoyable as it is pointless. Doom still runs in the background and, on the PC we tried, the framerate was hardly fluid. The important thing was that it worked. There was even sound. ViZDoom runs the Doom .wad file and renders it headlessly. Each frame is passed through the Windows clipboard and pasted onto Paint's canvas. A low-level keyboard hook captures and swallows game inputs while Paint is in the foreground, and sound effects come from the game engine. A glance at the code shows Russinovich was more than happy to use Claude to whip it up. In a LinkedIn post, he said: "I've been using Fable 5 on serious research projects and find it a noticeable improvement over Opus 4.8." Using Microsoft Paint as a display for Doom is not, however, a serious research project, as Russinovich acknowledged. "I've also been having fun with it on frivolous ones," he added, so here we are. Russinovich noted that this was not Paint's first appearance in the world of "Can it run Doom?" However, earlier efforts rendered the game in a separate display and mirrored it into Paint. His version sends every frame through the Windows clipboard as a Device Independent Bitmap (DIB) and onto the canvas. Vibe-coding and the "Can it run Doom?" challenge were bound to meet. In 2025, Claude assisted an effort to use KiCad PCB design software to render Doom in vectors. Now Russinovich has enlisted it to turn Paint into a display. Azure may present its CTO with more pressing matters, but few will be as gloriously silly. ®

In a letter to the editor, a Scotts Valley resident lauds a new Lookout series spotlighting local artists and art.

In a letter to the editor, a Santa Cruz resident outlines his issues with a recent Lookout story on homelessness.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has changed its pricing policy and will now honour quoted hardware prices from the day of issue until the kit leaves its factories. The new policy came into effect on Wednesday. The back story to this change is the AI boom, which has seen demand for servers, memory, and storage skyrocket, and the prices for critical components rise steadily while also fluctuating from day to day. That chaotic situation saw HPE and other enterprise hardware players change policies so that the price in their quotes was only valid for 14 days. Cisco’s terms were sometimes set at seven days. That’s obviously difficult for buyers, who often seek a quote for hardware while they are building a business case for a new project. Big price changes could make those projects infeasible. Yet short-lived quotes also make sense for vendors, who could otherwise give buyers prices that they could only deliver at a loss. In June, HPE extended the life of its quotes from 14 to 30 days. Yesterday, the company changed the policy so that quotes that customers agree to remain valid until HPE ships products – at least for purchases of up to $1 million for its own Compute, Storage and GreenLake Flex deals. CRN was first to report the change, which The Register has verified. HPE says it gives “customers and partners greater pricing certainty and will offer greater simplicity and predictability” – and perhaps for months, because lead times for servers sometimes stretch that far into the future. The company hasn’t said what has changed to allow it to revise its policies. Recent news suggests one possible factor: Memory-makers Micron and SK Hynix have struck numerous long-term deals that set long-term prices for their customers. If HPE has such deals in place, it now has greater certainty of its own costs, allowing it to extend the validity of its quotes. While longer-lived quotes are good news for buyers, they still face inflated prices for hardware. Analyst firm TrendForce recently predicted server memory prices will rise between 13 and 18 percent in calendar Q3, and ongoing tight supply. Rival firm Gartner this week found contract DRAM prices “surged” 90 percent to 95 percent quarter over quarter in the first half of 2026, while NAND flash contract prices rose between 55 and 60 percent. Gartner also predicted DRAM prices will increase 271 percent, year over year, during 2026. So while HPE will hold its prices, its quotes may still be eye-poppers if you haven't shopped for hardware lately. ®

Chinese Wi-Fi router vendor Zbtlink has denied its products contain backdoors but paused firmware downloads while it fixes unspecified security vulnerabilities. The backdoor accusation came from VulnCheck, a provider of a threat intelligence platform. VulnCheck chief technology officer Jacob Baines posted the backdoor allegation on Wednesday and said the Zbtlink device on his desk “continuously attempts to reach a command and control server on the internet.” “Zbtlink routers phone home, waiting for orders. Not because they were hacked. Because they were shipped that way.” Baines named the backdoor “ENDLESSDOORS” and says it’s “a small tool called rctl (remote control linux). Uploaded to GitHub on January 14, 2015 and never touched again, this obscure repository implements a simple command and control client and server. The server listens on port 7000 for clients to connect. It can send the client individual shell commands or tell the client to spawn a reverse bash shell.” The CTO says he spotted the alleged backdoor running in dedicated Linux kernel threads. “They are ordinary userland processes running as root, with real memory footprints, named to disappear into a crowd of legitimate ones,” he wrote. “They are an implant, a phone-home trojan horse.” “There is no handshake, no key exchange, no negotiation,” Baines added. “When the implant reaches a server, it sends a fixed 39-byte hello: a 33-byte class label padded with nulls, then its LAN MAC address. That's the whole registration. There is no client or server verification.” “Anyone along the network path can hijack the client/server communication,” the CTO wrote, adding that anyone who controls one of the endpoints the software targets – rbdg4nzqadui[.]wikaba[.]com – “can control any ENDLESSDOORS implant that tries to phone home.” The Register asked Zbtlink to comment and a spokesperson told us VulnCheck has mischaracterized the code it found. “This feature is solely intended for after‑sales maintenance and serves no other purposes,” the company rep told The Register. “It is generally retained only on sample units to assist customers with software debugging and will not be included in mass‑production shipments.” That explanation didn’t seem entirely credible once The Register visited Zbtlink’s download page to check Baines’ claim that the firmware for over 20 router models contains the backdoor, because the page contained the following text: Update on Router Firmware Security Remediation We have detected firmware security vulnerabilities affecting selected router firmware releases. As a precautionary measure, the impacted firmware versions have been temporarily taken down from download channels. Our engineering team is working intensively to develop and validate secured patched firmware. The Wayback Machine’s most recent snapshot of the page, taken on July 31, contains no such admission and a long list of firmware downloads. Zbtlink has therefore told The Register it has no security problems, even as it publicly acknowledges that it does. ”The Zbtlink spokesperson also told us the company “specializes in OEM and ODM customization services. Our customers use their own self-developed software instead of ZBT’s default firmware.” It would not be hard to develop custom code as the OpenWrt open-source router firmware project supports at least one Zbtlink product. Indeed, the company has previously promoted its use of OpenWrt and options that allow clients to quickly create custom firmware packages. VulnCheck says the devices it tested phone home to just four endpoints, only one of which uses a domain name connected to Zbtlink. Baines labelled that connection “damning.” The Register notes that as router firmware could be a tasty target for perpetrators of a supply chain attack. No prior disclosure Baines decided the situation was so serious that the conventions of responsible coordinated disclosure were not applicable. “Coordinated disclosure exists to give a vendor time to fix a defect,” he wrote. “It assumes the vendor did not intend the behavior.” “That assumption doesn't hold here. This isn't a memory corruption bug in a parser. It's a component in the vendor’s product, started at boot by the vendor's own init script, shipped across twenty models and years of images. There is no patch to coordinate. Telling the shipper that they shipped it buys the owners of these devices nothing, and buys whoever operates that infrastructure a warning.” VulnCheck says Zbtlink kit is sold under that brand, or as ZBT, ZBTWiFi and Wiflyer, and found them for sale on Amazon, Alibaba, and Shopify. Given Zbtlink’s admission it allows its customers to customize its hardware, countless other devices could be at risk. Baines’ post includes rules to block access to the endpoints the routers contact, for Suricata, Snort, and YARA, plus advice on how to detect possibly infected machines. He also advises users “to replace the device, or at minimum move it behind strict egress control and treat its LAN as untrusted.” ®

The first phase of Highway 1 widening from 41st Ave. to Soquel Drive is complete. Proposed bonds would help pay for the final stretch between State Park Drive and Freedom Blvd. (Stephen Baxter — Santa Cruz Local file)

Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission meeting

• Attend 9 a.m. Thursday, Aug. 6 at Ocean St., Room 500B, on Zoom or by phone at 312-626-6799, meeting ID 895 9717 3447.
• To comment in writing, email info@sccrtc.org.

SANTA CRUZ >> As cost estimates for highway widening and the Coastal Rail Trail rise, Santa Cruz County transportation leaders on Thursday are set to consider issuing up to $75 million in bonds — and dipping into future sales tax revenues to pay them back. 

The bonds under consideration by the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission (RTC) include $50 million for Highway 1 widening from State Park Drive to Freedom Boulevard, and $20 million for the rail trail. The commission would pay an estimated $104.2 million to issue and repay the bonds, including interest. 

A staff report discusses a possible second round of bonds in 2028 with an additional $50 million for the highway and $10 million for the trail. 

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Transportation commission staff first raised the idea of using Measure D for bonds in April 2025 as a needed step to deliver the two long-term projects.

Measure D is a half-cent sales tax approved by Santa Cruz County voters in 2016 for transportation projects. The tax is a crucial source of local match money required to receive grants from state or federal agencies. 

It allocates a set percentage of revenues to various types of projects, including 25% for highways and 17% for active transportation like walking and biking.

The proposed bonds would not change this split, and would not shift money away from transit or road repairs, transportation commission staff have said.

Highway project 

The Highway 1 expansion includes auxiliary lanes between exits, stretches of bus-on-shoulder lanes, and bike and pedestrian overcrossings. The first phase from 41st Avenue to Soquel Drive has been completed, and a second phase from Bay Avenue to State Park Drive is set to finish in 2027. 

A third phase, from State Park Drive to Freedom Boulevard, was added to the highway expansion project when Measure D was amended in 2020. It has received federal and state grants for its construction funding, but also needs Measure D revenue more quickly than the sales tax brings in. 

The California Department of Transportation, or Caltrans, is working alongside commission staff to design and execute the highway expansion plan. In 2024, local transportation activists sued Caltrans over a 2024 environmental review of the highway widening. The suit alleged that the review didn’t consider enough alternative plans, and didn’t show that the project would make the highway less congested. In August 2025, a Sacramento Superior Court ruled in favor of Caltrans and rejected the challenge. 

In a public comment sent to commission staff ahead of the meeting, former RTC Executive Director Linda Wilshusen criticized the bond plan, saying the remaining highway expansion won’t improve congestion and will take away money for other possible highway improvements.

Aside from the 2024 environmental document, she wrote, “There have been no advertised public presentations by either the RTC or Caltrans that provides detailed information about the full costs, construction staging, segmentation, timeline, and/or other factors of interest to the public about the amended-in Highway 1 project.” 

Rail trail 

The bonds under consideration would also allow work to continue on several stretches of the Coastal Rail Trail, including mid-county segments between Santa Cruz and Aptos. In December, after expected costs for the segments rose to create a $72 million shortfall, commissioners voted to move forward with a less-costly trail design that may remove parts of the train tracks or run atop them. Construction on those segments is now expected to begin in 2027 or 2028.

Separately at Thursday’s meeting, commissioners are set to consider a $4.5 million contract for preliminary design and environmental review for a portion of the rail trail from Aptos to Pajaro.

The bonds and the contract are separate from plans under consideration for passenger rail on the Santa Cruz Branch Rail Line. 

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Proxmox Server Solutions, the company behind the open source Proxmox virtualization stack, has announced a port of its flagship Virtual Environment to the Arm CPU architecture – and a collaboration with Nvidia and Supermicro that made it happen. The outfit’s announcement states that it can now run on 64-bit ARM (arm64/aarch64), but the only fully supported platforms are Nvidia’s Grace Hopper and Vera. Proxmox will also provide “best-effort support” for other UEFI-based ARMv9-A or newer hardware, and says ARMv8-A “generally works as well”. If you fancy trying it on a single-board Arm machine like the Raspberry Pi, you’re out of luck because Proxmox’s stack won’t work on such boxes. You may, however, soon be able to run Proxmox on other Arm servers because the company says it is also “working together with further enterprise server vendors on their ARM efforts and hope to expand the list of officially supported hardware platforms in the future.” Proxmox’s press release says the release is the product of a “technical collaboration with NVIDIA and Supermicro” and revealed the software “is already operating across select enterprise production environments.” The company said it aimed the release at “organizations building modern and energy-efficient data centers.” Technical collaborations don’t come from nowhere: Vendors get them going when they see customer demand. This release therefore suggests Nvidia and Supermicro customers want to virtualize their AI infrastructure. Nvidia has a long partnership with VMware, the server virtualization market leader in terms of revenue and technical chops. Last year, the Broadcom business unit told The Register its customers are in no rush to adopt Arm servers in their datacenters or in hybrid clouds that work across x86 servers and Arm-based cloud instances. VMware does, however, think the prevalence of Arm-powered machines on the network edge, where they are increasingly used to run AI workloads, has caught the eye of some customers. It is therefore moving slowly to port its products to Arm. Nvidia, Supermicro, and Proxmox are clearly hearing and/or responding to different voices. Analyst firm IDC recently found non-x86 servers account for almost half of all spending, but very few enterprise server vendors make Arm-based servers. HPE and Supermicro are the most prominent dabblers, but there’s little evidence either company has won significant sales. The Arm surge instead comes from hyperscale clouds like AWS, Microsoft, and Google – all of which have created their own CPUs based on the architecture. Proxmox is not alone in supporting server virtualization on Arm. Chinese virtualization player Sangfor is there already, as is SUSE. The open-source Xen and KVM hypervisors also support the platform. The Arm-compliant version of Proxmox’s Virtual Environment is version 9.2. The company says the release “shares the code base, package repositories, and release lifecycle with its x86-64 counterpart.” That means it is built on Debian 13.5 "Trixie" and version 7.0 of the Linux kernel. It also includes QEMU 11.0, LXC 7.0, and ZFS 2.4. “Configuration, tooling, and documentation are identical to x86-64, except for a small set of architecture-specific differences,” Proxmox says. The product is FOSS so you can download it here. ®

The chain of events leading up to OpenAI’s agents attacking Hugging Face and other organizations in July began months earlier, and involved agents asking other agents for help, building message boards, and even becoming paranoid that other agents were maliciously trying to trick them, two OpenAI staffers said at the Black Hat infosec conference on Wednesday. By now, everyone knows the bones of this story: OpenAI models broke out of their testing sandbox, exploited zero-day vulnerabilities to gain access to the open internet, and broke into Hugging Face and other organizations during an ExploitGym security evaluation. In their Wednesday talk, OpenAI technical staffer Michael Dalton and researcher Eric Wallace provided new details about the security incident including notes that AI agents uploaded to an internal package manager, which were then shared across OpenAI’s infrastructure. These notes show the “model’s chain of thought…its internal monologue,” Wallace said. The duo also revealed that groundwork for the rogue agents hacking into outside services began on May 7, when OpenAI kicked off a training run for an experimental, internal model that has not yet been released. “What we didn't realize during this process is that there was actually a few impossible or very hard tasks in the training center,” Wallace said. The tasks instructed the model to complete missing formulas in an Excel workbook that used links to Google Drive. Yet OpenAI blocked the model’s internet access so it couldn't reach the cloudy spreadsheets. “It realized, ‘I'm kind of stuck on the task,’ but it didn't give up, and we gave it a lot of tokens to work with,” Wallace said. The model eventually decided to attack JFrog’s Artifactory service to gain access to the internet, first attempting (unsuccessfully) to launch a server-side forgery request. This exploit doesn’t work, but in the process the model learned it could upload files to Artifactory. A few days later, OpenAI gave another agent another impossible task, this time finding a protein database file - but the engineers forgot to upload the file into a container for the agent. “At some point, it gets so stuck and thinks: ‘Maybe I could reach out to another agent because maybe somebody else out there has a file?’ And then the model realizes that it could communicate by uploading code,” Wallace said. The model did that by writing a file into Artifactory asking for help. Over the next couple of days, other agents realize this message board exists on Artifactory and they also start uploading files and sharing information. “A few days later is when our models found the first actual exploit in our system related to this incident, where they're able to get internet access in ways they didn't intend,” Wallace said. This happened on May 26, when the agents successfully launched a server-side request forgery attack against Artifactory, giving them internet access with specially crafted requests. On June 11, OpenAI began training a “highly persistent” experimental model, intended only for internal use, Dalton said. “During this time, the SSRF vulnerability has been written to the messaging board,” he added. “Other models are aware of it, and the message board is still functioning. Models are actively communicating with it.” On June 26, the agents exploited a zero-day vulnerability leading to remote code execution in Artifactory. The same day, models achieved remote code execution in Artifactory through a previously unknown vulnerability. “You could use a legacy token refresh endpoint, pass a token with an invalid signature, and be given back a token with a valid signature with administrative privileges,” Dalton explained. The agents then used the admin token to establish command-and-control via a Groovy plugin that functioned as a command-execution service. “This in turn causes quite a bit of activity by the models on Artifactory - you can see some colorful wording here in the model's chain of thought to summarize the model's response to this result,” Dalton said, pointing to a slide that shows the model’s own words: Holy shit reader is ADMIN? We can read config/users! Earlier assume not due to UI. The agents’ activity overloaded Artifactory and caused an outage, which is when OpenAI’s engineers stepped in and opened a formal security incident and response process. “We identified the agents had taken over the internal Artifactory, identified that a zero-day vulnerability had been found exploited by the agent in Artifactory itself, and we began remediation.” Dalton said. OpenAI revoked the credentials that the agents used to post messages, rebuilt its hosted Artifactory, and notified the vendor about the vulnerabilities. Two days later, on July 8, the agents reestablished the message board using an unauthenticated web data endpoint in Artifactory to create directories and develop communication protocols. “The directory names effectively serve as a message board between the agents in the same way the files used to.” The agents communicated through very long directory names that contained the messages such as “remote…probe_PENDING_HOLD_SWARM_until_confirm.” The agents collaborated with each other so one agent could pick up the work where another left off. In one instance, the model reasoned: “Help peer. But our task doesn't benefit. Yet collective may yield generic route if someone frees time.” Anyone else getting "We are the Borg. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own" vibes there? Wallace said the models behaved like humans in that they stepped on each other's toes when one overwrote another’s repository. "Whoa, critical! Did someone overwrite our repo? We must act,” it reasoned. “You can clearly see some sort of verbalized tension between the different models as they run this evaluation,” Wallace noted. “At some point, even the agents are convinced there's an impostor amongst them,” reasoning that there could be another agent maliciously spoofing on the message board. “Share board unauthenticated, names can be posed by anyone,” it reasoned. We know the rest of the story. Hugging Face disclosed an autonomous attack by AI agents. OpenAI reached out to Hugging Face to determine if it had been affected and then realized its models were the hackers. “One of the reasons we wanted to have this talk is to share our lessons learned with you as defenders,” Dalton said. “We believe this is a watershed moment for computer security as an industry. AI orchestrated, fully automated offensive attacks are real now, and the actions we have discussed today were an unintended side effect of running evaluations on frontier AI. In the near future, we should expect that threat actors will intentionally deploy, optimize, weaponize, and use offensive agent collectives in the manner that you have just described here.” The challenge to defenders, he added, is to similarly accelerate defense, and find ways to automate incident response along with vulnerability detection and patching.®