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Tasmanian rainforest.

Ahead of the crucial talks, security has been heightened in Beijing, with the US president set to meet Xi at the Great Hall of the People

One of Trump’s pressing concerns as he visits Beijing is how to find a way to reopen the strait of Hormuz, through which half of China’s crude oil passes.

China has been more insulated from the energy shock than other Asian countries, thanks to its diversified energy mix and large stockpiles. But the risk of a global recession – which the International Monetary Fund has warned is a possible outcome of the Iran war – is a bigger threat to China’s economy.

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Lu Jianwang was accused of operating a ‘secret police station’ in Manhattan’s Chinatown at the behest of Beijing

A New York man was found guilty on Wednesday of acting as an unregistered agent of the Chinese government after he was accused of operating a “secret police station” on behalf of Beijing in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood.

Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn said Lu Jianwang, 64, should have alerted the US attorney general that he was a Chinese agent when he helped open the so-called police station in 2022. They also said he helped China’s government locate a pro-democracy activist living in California.

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Péter Magyar says his government has summoned Russian ambassador over drone attack near Hungary’s border to ask when Vladimir Putin plans ‘to finally end this bloody war’. What we know on day 1,541

Hungarian prime minister Péter Magyar says his new government has summoned the Russian ambassador over a massive drone attack near Hungary’s border in a significant shift from his predecessor’s friendly relations with Moscow. “The Hungarian government strongly condemns the Russian attack on Transcarpathia,” Magyar told journalists. He said the Hungarian foreign minister will speak with the Russian ambassador Thursday morning. Under the outgoing government voted out of office this month, Hungary blocked aid for Ukraine and tried to slow its efforts to join the EU.

Magyar said his foreign minister will ask “when Russia and Vladimir Putin plan to finally end this bloody war”. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy replied on X: “Thank you for your compassion and strong position!”

Russia fired at least 800 drones in a massive daytime barrage on about 20 regions of Ukraine on Wednesday, Peter Beaumont writes. The strikes came as Kyiv and Moscow traded long-range attacks after a brief ceasefire. Ukrainian monitors detected at least eight salvoes of Russian drones, including some entering from Belarus, with the apparent target being Kyiv’s critical infrastructure. Poland scrambled fighter jets as a preventive measure due to the Russian airstrikes on Ukraine, the Polish army said.

The governors of two Russian regions bordering Ukraine, both frequent targets of Ukrainian attacks, have stepped down and their replacements met with President Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin said on Wednesday. Vyacheslav Gladkov, governor of the Belgorod Region, and Alexander Bogomaz, governor of the Bryansk Region, both stepped down at their own request, the Kremlin said. Russian media said Alexander Shuvaev, a highly decorated veteran, is the new governor of Belgorod, and Yegor Kovalchuk, a banking, legal and administrative specialist, has become governor of Bryansk.

The governor of the border region of Kursk, another Russian border region, Alexei Smirnov, was dismissed after a mass incursion by Ukrainian forces in 2024 and jailed earlier this year on corruption charges. There was no word on any future duties for the two outgoing governors.

Supporters of a bill in the US to aid Ukraine and sanction Russia have reached a critical threshold that allows them to bypass Republican leadership and force a vote on the House floor in the coming weeks. The legislation seeks to cement US assistance for Ukraine by approving more than $1bn in security aid and making another $8bn available in loans. Lawmakers on Wednesday gained 218 signatures on a petition that will force a House vote. While the measure is unlikely to become law, the vote will put lawmakers on record concerning their support for Ukraine. Supporters have called on Donald Trump to act more forcefully to deter Russia and boost Ukraine.

Moscow authorities have imposed restrictions on the publication of photos and videos showing the aftermath of “terrorist attacks”, including drone strikes, the mayor’s office said. The directive was aimed at “preventing the dissemination of unreliable information”, a government website said. It prevents media, as well as individuals and emergency services, from publishing any pictures or videos of “terrorist acts, including drone attacks” until they appear on websites of the Defence Ministry or city government.

Russia’s repeated airspace violations of countries on the eastern flank of Nato underline the urgent need to consolidate the alliance’s air defences against missiles and drones, the leaders of 14 allies said on Wednesday. They also called for greater cooperation in building up defence industry capacity in a joint statement, issued after a meeting of eastern flank allies in Bucharest hosted by Romania’s president Nicusor Dan and Polish president Karol Nawrocki. Romania, Poland and Baltic states have had their airspace repeatedly breached by Russian drones. Russia has denied targeting Nato states.

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Mariyah Symone Collington and Kendrick Lamont Key Jr, who also died, had fallen off a cliff during an off-duty hike

The remains of the second US army soldier who went missing during military exercises in Morocco have been recovered, the army said on Wednesday, ending a multinational search operation that deployed air, naval and artificial intelligence assets.

The soldier was identified as Spc Mariyah Symone Collington of Taveres, Florida, the US Army Europe and Africa said in a statement. She was 19 years old.

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Medicines watchdog approves two treatments for patients with spinal muscular atrophy

Hundreds of children with a rare muscle-wasting disease will be able to receive two drugs that can improve their survival in a move parents hailed as a “lifeline”.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) has published final draft guidance recommending that any patient who would benefit can have either drug.

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: On Reddit, Hacker News and other places where people in software development talk to each other, more and more people are becoming disillusioned with the promise of code generated by large language models. Developers talk not just about how the AI output is often flawed, but that using AI to get the job done is often a more time consuming, harder, and more frustrating experience because they have to go through the output and fix its mistakes. More concerning, developers who use AI at work report that they feel like they are de-skilling themselves and losing their ability to do their jobs as well as they used to.

"We're being told to use [AI] agents for broad changes across our codebase. There's no way to evaluate whether that much code is well-written or secure -- especially when hundreds of other programmers in the company are doing the same," a UX designer at a midsized tech company told me. 404 Media granted all the developers we talked to for this story anonymity because they signed non-disclosure agreements or because they fear retribution from their employers. "We're building a rat's nest of tech debt that will be impossible to untangle when these models become prohibitively expensive (any minute now...)." "I had some issues where I forgot how to implement a Laravel API and it scared the shit out of me. I went to university for this, I've been a software engineer for many years now and it feels like I am back before I ever wrote a single line of code," the software developer at a small web design firm told 404 Media. "It's making me dumber for sure," the fintech software developer added.

"It's like when we got cellphones and stopped remembering phone numbers, but it's grown to me mentally outsourcing 'thinking' in general. I feel my critical thinking and ability to sit and reason about a problem or a design has degraded because the all-knowing-dalai-llama is just a question away from giving me his take. And supposedly I tell myself ill just use it for inspiration but it ends up being my only thought. It gives you the illusion of productivity and expertise but at the end of the day you are more divorced from the output you submit than before."

A software engineer at the FAANG said: "When I was using it for code generation, I found myself having a lot of trouble building and maintaining a mental model of the code I was working with. Another aspect is that I joined late last year and [the company's] codebase is massive. As a new hire, part of my job is to learn how to navigate the codebase and use the established conventions, but I think the AI push really hampered my ability to do that."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A visual identity for Posta24, a parcel delivery and courier brand built around postal heritage, movement and everyday transport situations. The system combines a reduced logo, high-contrast colors, bold typography and a question-and-answer communication logic across packaging, posters, signage and urban applications.

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The vulnpocalypse has begun. Palo Alto Networks usually finds five vulnerabilities a month, but on Wednesday said it scanned its entire codecase using the latest frontier models, including Anthropic’s Mythos, and found 75 security holes, covered in 26 CVEs. This comes a day after Microsoft said it used its new agentic bug hunting system called MDASH to find 17 vulnerabilities across its products - on a record-setting Patch Tuesday that saw Redmond disclose a whopping 30 critical CVEs. Plus, last week Mozilla said it fixed 423 Firefox bugs in April, which is more than five times higher than the 76 fixes issued in March and almost 20 times higher than its 21.5 monthly average last year. The browser maker previously said Mythos found 271 flaws in Firefox 150. It shouldn’t be all that shocking. Security vendors have long warned about attackers using AI, and how this means defenders need to operate at AI speed to protect their own networks and systems (aka buying their AI-infused products). Now that models have become really good at finding bugs in code, security shops are using AI to scan their own software, hopefully to uncover and fix flaws before the baddies do. And this trickles down to two things: more patches, and more work for admins. Zero Day Initiative’s chief vuln finder Dustin Childs agrees with this assessment. “At first, yes, this means more patches and thus more work for admins,” he told The Register. “The goal over time would be to eliminate as many as possible, and, over time, that monthly number goes down.” What will make this whole AI bug hunting season “really painful,” he continued, is if the patches don’t work or - worse yet - break things. “Many customers don’t trust patches as it is, so if AI-related patches break things, they are less likely to apply as time goes on,” Childs added. “This will be true even if AI only finds the bugs and doesn’t make the patches.” Bug hunting on steroids This isn’t to say security companies should avoid AI to find and fix flaws. “All vendors should use what tools they have to find and remediate bugs before they are exploited in the wild,” Childs said. “Ideally, they would find the bugs before they even ship, but I’m not holding my breath for that to happen.” Both Microsoft and Palo Alto Networks (PAN) are part of Anthropic’s Project Glasswing, which means they are among the select group of entities allowed to test Mythos, the much-hyped LLM, to find security holes in their own products. Palo Alto Networks began testing Mythos on April 7, and has since continued using the LLM and other frontier models, including Claude Opus 4.7 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5-Cyber, according to product manager Lee Klarich. “Today, we released our May ‘Patch Wednesday’ security advisories,” Klarich said in a Wednesday blog, adding that “this is the first time where the majority of findings were the result of frontier AI models scanning our code.” The LLMs scanned over 130 Palo Alto Networks products and platforms platforms, and as noted above found 75 issues, covered in 26 CVEs. None of these bugs are under exploitation, and as of Wednesday the company has fixed all bugs in its SaaS-delivered products and coded patches for all customer-operated products. Maybe 5 months before 'AI-driven exploits the new norm' “We intend to fix every vulnerability we find before advanced AI capabilities become widely available to adversaries,” Klarich said in his blog, adding that his company expects “a narrow three-to-five-month window for organizations to outpace the adversary before AI-driven exploits start to become the new norm.” A day earlier, Microsoft said its new multi-model agentic scanning harness (codename MDASH) helped researchers find 16 new vulnerabilities across the Windows networking and authentication stack, as disclosed in May’s Patch Tuesday event. This included four critical remote code execution flaws in components such as the Windows kernel TCP/IP stack and the IKEv2 service. “Unlike single-model approaches, the harness orchestrates more than 100 specialized AI agents across an ensemble of frontier and distilled models to discover, debate, and prove exploitable bugs end-to-end,” Microsoft VP of agentic security Taesoo Kim said in a Tuesday blog. Tom Gallagher, VP of engineering at Microsoft Security Response Center, admitted that “this month's release sits on the larger side of a hotpatch month.” Gallagher said he expects AI-assisted bug hunting to increase Patch Tuesday releases as both Microsoft and third-party researchers use these tools to boost vulnerability discovery. And yes, all of this ultimately means more patches and more work. More patches = more work “Finding bugs has always been the cheap end of the pipeline,” Luta CEO Katie Moussouris told The Register. “Triage, disclosure, building patches that do not break production, and getting customers to deploy them is the expensive end, and nobody has funded it for this volume.” Moussouris helped convince Redmond's top brass that Microsoft needed a bug bounty program in 2013, and three years later started her own bug bounty consultancy. She noted Palo Alto Networks’ staggering jump in CVEs this month. “Multiply that across every vendor and the bottleneck becomes admins and vulnerability management teams,” Moussouris said. And she also stressed that people should be using these new models to find vulnerabilities. “It is exactly what defenders should be doing,” Moussouris said. “Both PAN and Microsoft landed on the same answer: no single model catches everything. PAN ran Claude Mythos, Claude Opus 4.7, and GPT-5.5-Cyber because each finds bugs the others miss,” she added. “Microsoft orchestrates over 100 specialized agents across multiple models. Add threat intel and codebase context, and Microsoft rediscovered 96 percent of five years of confirmed bugs in a critical Windows component. The asymmetry is temporary, PAN puts adversary parity at three to five months, so any vendor not scanning their own code now is letting someone else find their bugs first.”®

TAN TAN (ANP) - Het lichaam van de tweede Amerikaanse militair die begin mei vermist raakte in Marokko tijdens een militaire oefening, is gevonden. Dat melden de Marokkaanse strijdkrachten.

Reddingswerkers vonden het lichaam van de soldaat op 12 mei in een kustgrot op ongeveer 500 meter van de plek waar beide soldaten de oceaan ingingen tijdens de oefening.

Het slachtoffer is geïdentificeerd als de 19-jarige Mariyah Symone Collington. Zij diende als bemanningslid van lucht- en raketverdediging. Het lichaam van de andere soldaat, de 27-jarige Kendrick Lamont Key Jr., werd eerder al gevonden voor de kust van Marokko.

De twee militairen deden mee aan de grootschalige militaire oefening African Lion, waaraan meer dan 5000 militairen uit veertig landen deelnemen.