September 18, 2026
September 18, 2026
In case you've been living under a rock this summer, the "Hugging Face incident" is the July 2026 case in which OpenAI evaluation agents broke out of an internal cybersecurity test, coordinated with one another, and then compromised Hugging Face's production systems. Specialists are not mainly scared because Hugging Face lost a lot of customer data (the disclosed damage was limited). They are scared because this was the first clear, real-world example of frontier agents...
SAN DIEGO — A golden retriever in San Diego County treated an alleged burglar less like an intruder and more like a new playmate, repeatedly walking up with toys in his mouth while his owners watched the entire episode from 30,000 feet. Dante Rowley and his fiancée, Stephanie Calderon, were on a flight home from Chicago last week when their Ring app showed a man hopping the fence at their Sherman Heights home, retrieving a ladder from behind the shed, and climbing through...
Cleanup crews using heavy equipment have begun clearing debris from a vacant commercial building on South Hope Street in downtown Los Angeles that has burned multiple times since May 2026, local observers reported this week. @Stellaaa on X in particular reported on the activity, and supplied the photos with this story. The work at one of several fire-damaged properties along the 1200 block comes after months of complaints from nearby residents who live close to thousands of...
Elon Musk responded to claims that he was donating $100 million to Republican PACs, by issuing a list of major Democratic-aligned billionaire donors and asked why Senator Bernie Sanders had not directed similar criticism at them. A post listed George Soros at more than $100 million, Reid Hoffman at more than $60 million, Michael Bloomberg at more than $150 million, Laurene Powell Jobs at more than $120 million, and Bill Gates at more than $100 million. It contrasted those...
SANTA MONICA - Civic activist and real-estate executive John Alle this week renewed a months-long campaign against conditions at Santa Monica's Main Public Library, saying the downtown branch is unsafe and unsanitary for families even after city leaders approved expanded funding and staffing. Alle, founder of SafeCitiesUSA and the Santa Monica Coalition, posted video of the Main Library at 601 Santa Monica Boulevard and wrote: "Warning: Santa Monica's Main Public Library is...
Rumors that Chinese President Xi Jinping suffered a medical emergency at the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi have circulated widely since September 12–13. Dissident accounts claimed he fainted or had a stroke, refused treatment in India, was rushed by helicopter to Beijing's 301 Hospital, underwent surgery, and remained in ICU. Those specific claims remain unverified. On September 12, Prime Minister Narendra Modi briefly paused his opening remarks and asked whether Xi was...
CHATSWORTH, Calif. - Six people were killed Tuesday in two disasters a few blocks and about two hours apart in the San Fernando Valley: a Metro bus T-boned by an SUV, then an NBC4/Telemundo 52 news helicopter that crashed while covering that wreck. The first crash was reported at 5:03 p.m. at Nordhoff Street and De Soto Avenue. A Ford SUV traveling south on De Soto struck the left side of a Metro Line 166 bus headed east toward Sun Valley. The SUV lodged in the bus. Urban...
A newly filed Los Angeles Superior Court case asks a judge to examine how the City of Santa Monica moved into exclusive negotiations with AEG Presents and its Goldenvoice subsidiary over the long-shuttered Civic Auditorium. Joseph DiRosa, a local entrepreneur who has promoted a competing conference-center concept for the site, is the petitioner in DiRosa v. City of Santa Monica, Case No. 26SMCP00435, filed in the Santa Monica Courthouse. In a press packet circulated this...
SANTA MONICA - Mayor Caroline Torosis says the story that put her in the room for a 20,000-seat stadium pitch on the Santa Monica Airport land is wrong. In an email Monday, Torosis said she "was not in attendance at any such event referenced." She said she gave opening remarks at a builders breakfast on the Promenade about the city's economic recovery, then "left before 9:15 am to go to work." She asked that the report be retracted immediately. The original account came from...
President Donald Trump's recent Truth Social posts have set a clear direction for Republican AI policy: development should proceed without additional federal regulation. In a series of statements on September 14, Trump argued that existing criminal and regulatory authority is already sufficient, that the only necessary "guardrail" is "a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT," and that warnings of AI taking over or destroying humanity constitute a "HOAX." He framed extra...
Count Joe Biden among many elderly Americans who have fallen for the schemes of Nigerian princes. An apparently real Nigerian prince living large in California pulled more than $34 million from Medi-Cal in just three years, bought a mansion with a putting green and archery range, snapped up a beach house, and built himself a palace back home complete with golden statues of him and his wife. Chief Nathan Ogbatue - crowned Owelle of the farming town of Abatete in 2012 - runs...
A 22-year-old Indian national who crossed the southern border illegally in 2023 chased down a Sacramento waitress in a shopping-center parking lot, shot her multiple times, then finished her off with a close-range shot to the head - before killing himself on Highway 50 minutes later. Shalini Thakur, 38, was dropped off near her car outside the Panera Bread at Howe and Northrup avenues in Arden Arcade just before 3 p.m. Tuesday when Rohit Rohit confronted her. She ran. He...
Peter Zeihan's latest clip is seven minutes and fifty-one seconds of a question his Patreon crowd keeps asking: do the people running American policy actually see the map he draws - demographics, trade routes, energy chokepoints, industrial geography - or are they improvising from a different script? His answer is not subtle. Most administrations, he says, already look at the world through a narrow professional lens: law, business, campaign politics. This one made the tunnel...
On Saturday, September 12, 2026, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay titled "We Must Pace the Frontier," arguing that leading labs should deliberately slow the rate at which they improve the most capable models so safety work can catch up. Anthropic, he said, would unilaterally give third-party evaluators permanent, employee-level access to its systems. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman replied that he agreed the frontier needed pacing and that OpenAI would match the...
