• Police seek suspects in deadly birthday party shooting
  • Lawmakers launch inquires into U.S. boat strike
  • Nov. 29, 2025, 10:07 PM EST / Updated Nov. 30, 2025,…
  • Mark Kelly says troops ‘can tell’ what orders…

Be that!

contact@bethat.ne.com

 

Be That ! Menu   ≡ ╳
  • Home
  • Travel
  • Culture
  • Lifestyle
  • Sport
  • Contact Us
  • Politics Politics
☰

Be that!

D.C. mayor: National Guard was ‘targeted’ in shooting

admin - Latest News - November 26, 2025
admin
8 views 13 secs 0 Comments



Mayor Muriel Bowser tells NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell that the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, D.C. was “targeted.”



Source link

TAGS:
PREVIOUS
Campbell's fires executive accused of racist remarks and labeling food for 'poor people'
NEXT
Georgia election case against Trump dismissed
Related Post
November 18, 2025
Savewith a NBCUniversal ProfileCreate your free profile or log in to save this articleNov. 18, 2025, 5:00 AM ESTBy Jared PerloJudge Victoria Kolakowski sensed something was wrong with Exhibit 6C.Submitted by the plaintiffs in a California housing dispute, the video showed a witness whose voice was disjointed and monotone, her face fuzzy and lacking emotion. Every few seconds, the witness would twitch and repeat her expressions.Kolakowski, who serves on California’s Alameda County Superior Court, soon realized why: The video had been produced using generative artificial intelligence. Though the video claimed to feature a real witness — who had appeared in another, authentic piece of evidence — Exhibit 6C was an AI “deepfake,” Kolakowski said.The case, Mendones v. Cushman & Wakefield, Inc., appears to be one of the first instances in which a suspected deepfake was submitted as purportedly authentic evidence in court and detected — a sign, judges and legal experts said, of a much larger threat. Citing the plaintiffs’ use of AI-generated material masquerading as real evidence, Kolakowski dismissed the case on Sept. 9. The plaintiffs sought reconsideration of her decision, arguing the judge suspected but failed to prove that the evidence was AI-generated. Judge Kolakowski denied their request for reconsideration on Nov. 6. The plaintiffs did not respond to a request for comment.With the rise of powerful AI tools, AI-generated content is increasingly finding its way into courts, and some judges are worried that hyperrealistic fake evidence will soon flood their courtrooms and threaten their fact-finding mission. NBC News spoke to five judges and 10 legal experts who warned that the rapid advances in generative AI — now capable of producing convincing fake videos, images, documents and audio — could erode the foundation of trust upon which courtrooms stand. Some judges are trying to raise awareness and calling for action around the issue, but the process is just beginning.“The judiciary in general is aware that big changes are happening and want to understand AI, but I don’t think anybody has figured out the full implications,” Kolakowski told NBC News. “We’re still dealing with a technology in its infancy.”Prior to the Mendones case, courts have repeatedly dealt with a phenomenon billed as the “Liar’s Dividend,” — when plaintiffs and defendants invoke the possibility of generative AI involvement to cast doubt on actual, authentic evidence. But in the Mendones case, the court found the plaintiffs attempted the opposite: to falsely admit AI-generated video as genuine evidence. Judge Stoney Hiljus, who serves in Minnesota’s 10th Judicial District and is chair of the Minnesota Judicial Branch’s AI Response Committee, said the case brings to the fore a growing concern among judges. “I think there are a lot of judges in fear that they’re going to make a decision based on something that’s not real, something AI-generated, and it’s going to have real impacts on someone’s life,” he said.Many judges across the country agree, even those who advocate for the use of AI in court. Judge Scott Schlegel serves on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal in Louisiana and is a leading advocate for judicial adoption of AI technology, but he also worries about the risks generative AI poses to the pursuit of truth. “My wife and I have been together for over 30 years, and she has my voice everywhere,” Schlegel said. “She could easily clone my voice on free or inexpensive software to create a threatening message that sounds like it’s from me and walk into any courthouse around the country with that recording.”“The judge will sign that restraining order. They will sign every single time,” said Schlegel, referring to the hypothetical recording. “So you lose your cat, dog, guns, house, you lose everything.”Judge Erica Yew, a member of California’s Santa Clara County Superior Court since 2001, is passionate about AI’s use in the court system and its potential to increase access to justice. Yet she also acknowledged that forged audio could easily lead to a protective order and advocated for more centralized tracking of such incidents. “I am not aware of any repository where courts can report or memorialize their encounters with deep-faked evidence,” Yew told NBC News. “I think AI-generated fake or modified evidence is happening much more frequently than is reported publicly.”Yew said she is concerned that deepfakes could corrupt other, long-trusted methods of obtaining evidence in court. With AI, “someone could easily generate a false record of title and go to the county clerk’s office,” for example, to establish ownership of a car. But the county clerk likely will not have the expertise or time to check the ownership document for authenticity, Yew said, and will instead just enter the document into the official record.“Now a litigant can go get a copy of the document and bring it to court, and a judge will likely admit it. So now do I, as a judge, have to question a source of evidence that has traditionally been reliable?” Yew wondered. Though fraudulent evidence has long been an issue for the courts, Yew said AI could cause an unprecedented expansion of realistic, falsified evidence. “We’re in a whole new frontier,” Yew said.Santa, Calif., Clara County Superior Court Judge Erica Yew.Courtesy of Erica YewSchlegel and Yew are among a small group of judges leading efforts to address the emerging threat of deepfakes in court. They are joined by a consortium of the National Center for State Courts and the Thomson Reuters Institute, which has created resources for judges to address the growing deepfake quandary. The consortium labels deepfakes as “unacknowledged AI evidence” to distinguish these creations from “acknowledged AI evidence” like AI-generated accident reconstruction videos, which are recognized by all parties as AI-generated.Earlier this year, the consortium published a cheat sheet to help judges deal with deepfakes. The document advises judges to ask those providing potentially AI-generated evidence to explain its origin, reveal who had access to the evidence, share whether the evidence had been altered in any way and look for corroborating evidence. In April 2024, a Washington state judge denied a defendant’s efforts to use an AI tool to clarify a video that had been submitted. Beyond this cadre of advocates, judges around the country are starting to take note of AI’s impact on their work, according to Hiljus, the Minnesota judge.“Judges are starting to consider, is this evidence authentic? Has it been modified? Is it just plain old fake? We’ve learned over the last several months, especially with OpenAI’s Sora coming out, that it’s not very difficult to make a really realistic video of someone doing something they never did,” Hiljus said. “I hear from judges who are really concerned about it and who think that they might be seeing AI-generated evidence but don’t know quite how to approach the issue.” Hiljus is currently surveying state judges in Minnesota to better understand how generative AI is showing up in their courtrooms. To address the rise of deepfakes, several judges and legal experts are advocating for changes to judicial rules and guidelines on how attorneys verify their evidence. By law and in concert with the Supreme Court, the U.S. Congress establishes the rules for how evidence is used in lower courts.One proposal crafted by Maura R. Grossman, a research professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo and a practicing lawyer, and Paul Grimm, a professor at Duke Law School and former federal district judge, would require parties alleging that the opposition used deepfakes to thoroughly substantiate their arguments. Another proposal would transfer the duty of deepfake identification from impressionable juries to judges. The proposals were considered by the U.S. Judicial Conference’s Advisory Committee on Evidence Rules when it conferred in May, but they were not approved. Members argued “existing standards of authenticity are up to the task of regulating AI evidence.” The U.S. Judicial Conference is a voting body of 26 federal judges, overseen by the chief justice of the Supreme Court. After a committee recommends a change to judicial rules, the conference votes on the proposal, which is then reviewed by the Supreme Court and voted upon by Congress.Despite opting not to move the rule change forward for now, the committee was eager to keep a deepfake evidence rule “in the bullpen in case the Committee decides to move forward with an AI amendment in the future,” according to committee notes. Grimm was pessimistic about this decision given how quickly the AI ecosystem is evolving. By his accounting, it takes a minimum of three years for a new federal rule on evidence to be adopted.The Trump administration’s AI Action Plan, released in July as the administration’s road map for American AI efforts, highlights the need to “combat synthetic media in the court system” and advocates for exploring deepfake-specific standards similar to the proposed evidence rule changes. Yet other law practitioners think a cautionary approach is wisest, waiting to see how often deepfakes are really passed off as evidence in court and how judges react before moving to update overarching rules of evidence. Jonathan Mayer, the former chief science and technology adviser and chief AI officer at the U.S. Justice Department under President Joe Biden and now a professor at Princeton University, told NBC News he routinely encountered the issue of AI in the court system: “A recurring question was whether effectively addressing AI abuses would require new law, including new statutory authorities or court rules.”“We generally concluded that existing law was sufficient,” he said. However, “the impact of AI could change — and it could change quickly — so we also thought through and prepared for possible scenarios.”In the meantime, attorneys may become the first line of defense against deepfakes invading U.S. courtrooms. Louisiana Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal Judge Scott Schlegel.Courtesy of Scott SchlegelJudge Schlegel pointed to Louisiana’s Act 250, passed earlier this year, as a successful and effective way to change norms about deepfakes at the state level. The act mandates that attorneys exercise “reasonable diligence” to determine if evidence they or their clients submit has been generated by AI. “The courts can’t do it all by themselves,” Schlegel said. “When your client walks in the door and hands you 10 photographs, you should ask them questions. Where did you get these photographs? Did you take them on your phone or a camera?”“If it doesn’t smell right, you need to do a deeper dive before you offer that evidence into court. And if you don’t, then you’re violating your duties as an officer of the court,” he said.Daniel Garrie, co-founder of cybersecurity and digital forensics company Law & Forensics, said that human expertise will have to continue to supplement digital-only efforts. “No tool is perfect, and frequently additional facts become relevant,” Garrie wrote via email. “For example, it may be impossible for a person to have been at a certain location if GPS data shows them elsewhere at the time a photo was purportedly taken.”Metadata — or the invisible descriptive data attached to files that describe facts like the file’s origin, date of creation and date of modification — could be a key defense against deepfakes in the near future. For example, in the Mendones case, the court found the metadata of one of the purportedly-real-but-deepfaked videos showed that the plaintiffs’ video was captured on an iPhone 6, which was impossible given that the plaintiff’s argument required capabilities only available on an iPhone 15 or newer. Courts could also mandate that video- and audio-recording hardware include robust mathematical signatures attesting to the provenance and authenticity of their outputs, allowing courts to verify that content was recorded by actual cameras. Such technological solutions may still run into critical stumbling blocks similar to those that plagued prior legal efforts to adapt to new technologies, like DNA testing or even fingerprint analysis. Parties lacking the latest technical AI and deepfake know-how may face a disadvantage in proving evidence’s origin.Grossman, the University of Waterloo professor, said that for now, judges need to keep their guard up.“Anybody with a device and internet connection can take 10 or 15 seconds of your voice and have a convincing enough tape to call your bank and withdraw money. Generative AI has democratized fraud.”“We’re really moving into a new paradigm,” Grossman said. “Instead of trust but verify, we should be saying: Don’t trust and verify.”Jared PerloJared Perlo is a writer and reporter at NBC News covering AI. He is currently supported by the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism.
October 31, 2025
California Gov. Gavin Newsom pans Trump's nuclear testing: 'Weakness masquerading as strength'
November 14, 2025
DHS announces $10K bonuses for 'exemplary' TSA agents
November 11, 2025
Nov. 11, 2025, 4:20 PM ESTBy Steve KopackFor only the second time in 10 years, one of America’s most broadly representative stock indexes, the S&P 500, is poised to give up its longtime spot as the world’s top performing stock index.But drill down deeper, and the scale of the S&P’s underperformance becomes even starker. Ranked against dozens of other countries’ indexes, the S&P’s annual performance so far is not even among the world’s top 20. Or the top 30, or 40.With annual returns of 16% through Monday, the S&P lands in 41st place among more than 60 stock indexes around the globe, according to an NBC News analysis. This number requires a few caveats, however. The companies in the S&P have created more value so far this year than listings on any other country’s index — more than $7.7 trillion in market value.That exceeds the annual economic output of every country on Earth, except the U.S. and China.Likewise, more than 5,400 companies choose to list their shares on the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq, according to the World Federation of Exchanges. This combined total gives the U.S. clear standing as the No. 1 destination for publicly traded companies outside of China.Still, the S&P’s relative performance this year is remarkably out of line with historical norms.window.addEventListener(“message”,function(a){if(void 0!==a.data[“datawrapper-height”]){var e=document.querySelectorAll(“iframe”);for(var t in a.data[“datawrapper-height”])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data[“datawrapper-height”][t]+”px”;r.style.height=d}}});On Wall Street, even the most bullish predictions for where the index will land at the end of 2025 would only bring the S&P just in line with the performance of most international markets.Another way to compare the S&P’s performance against the rest of the world is by comparing its returns to the MSCI All Country World Excluding U.S. Index, which tracks the indexes of 46 countries. The S&P 500 currently trails this index by more than 10%.That places the S&P on track to broadly underperform the rest of the world this year for only the second time in a decade, most recently in 2017.This gap in performance partly reflects the trade uncertainty that has cast a shadow over the U.S. economy since President Donald Trump began his second term in late January. Trump’s on-again-off-again tariff policies have caused investors around the world to look beyond the United States for more stable, safer opportunities. America’s mounting debt, a sinking U.S. dollar and Trump’s attacks on the independence of the Federal Reserve have also given investors pause.The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Tariffs vs. AIAfter Trump won the 2024 election, stocks had a strong start to the year. Markets hit record highs in mid-February. But on worries about his tariff policies, markets plunged in March. When Trump rolled out his long-promised tariff policies in early April it sent markets spiraling further, with more than $5.8 trillion of value erased from the S&P 500 in a matter of days.On April 9, Trump announced he was pausing most of his global tariff rollout. Markets soared and the S&P 500 posted its third largest one-day gain in history. The Supreme Court is now considering the fate of Trump’s sweeping tariff agenda. Supreme Court hears oral arguments in Trump tariff case04:14If the administration loses, it could trigger refunds of the duties paid by importers due back to them, forcing the Treasury Department to issue new debt to pay for them, which could drive up yields.While tariff uncertainty has remained and the administration’s trade agenda has hit a number of speed bumps, most notably with China, equities have been buoyed by the rapidly expanding artificial intelligence boom.Trillions of dollars are being poured into the industry by companies and investments have sent the values of firms such as Nvidia, Apple, Amazon and Alphabet soaring to market values as high as $5 trillion. The U.S. currently has nine companies trading above $1 trillion in value. Fears have grown about a potential bubble in the sector. But still, the performance of U.S. stocks broadly lags the world by a wide margin.With AI and tech stocks fueling the momentum, a look at the other 493 companies in the S&P reveals some major differences. For the third quarter, those seven tech stocks are expected to post earnings growth of nearly 15%. The other 493 companies? The expectation is just 6.7%. “The economy is running at two speeds,” ABN AMRO senior economist Rogier Quaedvlieg wrote Tuesday. “AI and related sectors are thriving, whereas most other areas are stagnant or contracting.”The leadersThrough Monday, South Korea’s Kospi index held the No. 1 spot. The index that trades on the Korea Stock Exchange has posted a return of nearly 70% this year. “While semiconductor exports remain Korea’s central growth driver, the country is also emerging as a formidable defense exporter,” Franklin Templeton’s Dina Ting recently wrote. “Additionally, South Korea’s stock market has been buoyed by the rebound in its technology sector, notably semiconductors, as demand for memory chips recovers globally,” Ting added. “The country’s leadership in semiconductor manufacturing and AI-related investment are key drivers of this momentum.” window.addEventListener(“message”,function(a){if(void 0!==a.data[“datawrapper-height”]){var e=document.querySelectorAll(“iframe”);for(var t in a.data[“datawrapper-height”])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data[“datawrapper-height”][t]+”px”;r.style.height=d}}});After South Korea rank the likes of Kenya, Nigeria, Chile, Poland, Pakistan, Israel, Spain, Czechia and Jordan to round out the top 10.Not until more than 40 countries down the ranking does the S&P 500 appear. One of the ways that trade policies and tariffs have made the gap between the U.S. and other indexes wider than it might otherwise be is by weakening the U.S. dollar. The sinking dollar has helped propel international indexes higher. As the dollar weakens, the values of foreign investments and stock returns rise by comparison. In turn, a rising or stronger dollar would dampen the relative return of money invested outside the U.S.The currency factorThe Dollar Index, a measure of the U.S. currency’s strength against a basket of foreign currencies such as the pound, yen, euro, Swiss franc and Canadian dollar, has sunk 9% since the start of 2025. The continued erosion in the dollar’s value makes it more expensive for American companies and consumers to import goods, go on vacation or send money abroad.“I see signs that the attraction of the dollar is slightly eroded, and [the] future will tell whether there is more erosion of that,” European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde told CBS News in October.“For a currency to be really trusted you need a few things,” she said. “You need geopolitical credibility, you need the rule of law and strong institutions. And you need a military force that is strong enough.”“I think on at least one and possibly two accounts, the U.S. is still in a very dominant position,” Lagarde continued. But the central banker warned that the U.S. “needs to be very careful because those positions erode over the course of time.”Not everyone agrees. “The dollar’s been on a pretty good run over a long period of time and it’s certainly given back — this year given some of the policy actions — some of the gains, but fundamentally the dollar is the reserve currency of the world,” Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said on Bloomberg Television on Oct. 30. “I don’t see anything at the moment that threatens that.”“I think it’s something to watch, but I’m not concerned that there’s some fundamental shift,” Solomon said.Steve KopackSteve Kopack is a senior reporter at NBC News covering business and the economy.
Comments are closed.
Scroll To Top
  • Home
  • Travel
  • Culture
  • Lifestyle
  • Sport
  • Contact Us
  • Politics
© Copyright 2025 - Be That ! . All Rights Reserved