Tootfinder

Sources: investigators have uncovered evidence that Russia is at least in part responsible for a recent hack of the US federal court filing system (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/us/politics/russia-hack-federal-court-system.html…

Russia Is Suspected to Be Behind Breach of Federal Court Filing System
Federal officials are scrambling to assess the damage and address flaws in a sprawling, heavily used computer system long known to have vulnerabilities.

Russia Is Suspected to Be Behind Breach of Federal Court Filing System
Federal officials are scrambling to assess the damage and address flaws in a sprawling, heavily used computer system long known to have vulnerabilities.
Russia is at least in part responsible for a recent hack of the computer system that manages federal court documents,
including highly sensitive records that might contain information
that could reveal sources and people charged with national secur…

Russia Is Suspected to Be Behind Breach of Federal Court Filing System
Federal officials are scrambling to assess the damage and address flaws in a sprawling, heavily used computer system long known to have vulnerabilities.

Effective Training Data Synthesis for Improving MLLM Chart Understanding
Yuwei Yang, Zeyu Zhang, Yunzhong Hou, Zhuowan Li, Gaowen Liu, Ali Payani, Yuan-Sen Ting, Liang Zheng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06492

Effective Training Data Synthesis for Improving MLLM Chart Understanding
Being able to effectively read scientific plots, or chart understanding, is a central part toward building effective agents for science. However, existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs), especially open-source ones, are still falling behind with a typical success rate of 30%-50% on challenging benchmarks. Previous studies on fine-tuning MLLMs with synthetic charts are often restricted by their inadequate similarity to the real charts, which could compromise model training and performa…

"As a political force, the Labour left is finished. The tactic of entryism – entering the Labour party and changing it – is finished too."
"..a string of local council victories next year would pave the way for an unprecedented challenge to #Labour – not from the right, as the party has always had to fight, but from its radical flank. And this new movement could take parts of Lab…

The British left is coming for the Government
Whisper it as yet, but after five long years of confusion and disarray, the British left is rallying. Local political organisations are coalescing, from Chiswick to Liverpool to Newcastle. The Green P

On Friday, Trump’s border czar,
Tom Homan, said he plans to send the National Guard to Los Angeles
to combat protests against ICE that began this weekend following immigration raids in the city.
“We are making Los Angeles safer. Mayor Bass should be thanking us. She says they are going to mobilize—guess what?
We are already mobilizing.
We are going to bring the National Guard in tonight,”
Homan told Fox News.
California Governor Gavin Newsom respo…

LA protests live: National Guard to arrive within 24 hours after being deployed by Trump over immigration demos
Demonstrators clash with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials in hours-long stand-off

Identifying Fine-grained Forms of Populism in Political Discourse: A Case Study on Donald Trump's Presidential Campaigns
Ilias Chalkidis, Stephanie Brandl, Paris Aslanidis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19303

Identifying Fine-grained Forms of Populism in Political Discourse: A Case Study on Donald Trump's Presidential Campaigns
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of instruction-following tasks, yet their grasp of nuanced social science concepts remains underexplored. This paper examines whether LLMs can identify and classify fine-grained forms of populism, a complex and contested concept in both academic and media debates. To this end, we curate and release novel datasets specifically designed to capture populist discourse. We evaluate a range of pre-trained (larg…

About Trump and Epstein.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/19/us/politics/inside-trump-epstein-friendship.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Xk8.KHWP.KdYVidAz5…

Inside the Long Friendship Between Trump and Epstein
For nearly 15 years, the two men socialized together in Manhattan and Palm Beach, Fla., before a falling out that preceded Mr. Epstein’s first arrest.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) is threatening to remove Democratic lawmakers from office
for fleeing the state
and claiming they could be charged with crimes,
-- escalating tensions overnight
in a showdown over redrawing congressional lines
ahead of the midterm elections.

Most of the Democrats in the Texas state House exited the state Sunday
— many of whom arrived in Chicago in the evening
— to prevent Republicans from overhauling the state’s map t…

Abbott threatens to try to expel Democrats who fled Texas, escalating tensions
The Texas state House is set to reconvene at 3 p.m. CT Monday. Democrats have left the state to try to stop Republicans from moving ahead with enacting a new congressional map that would give the GOP five more safe seats.

House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed in a post on X,
“JUST SIX MONTHS into President Trump’s second term, America is safer, stronger, and more prosperous”
—despite ample evidence to the contrary.
Meanwhile, the White House posted an absurd cartoon depicting a slimmed-down Trump with $100 bills and bald eagles flying in the air around him,
plus a nearly two-minute-long video that touted his alleged accomplishments.
But millions of Americans would disagree with those …

Six Months in, Trump Has Made American Life Immeasurably Worse
Dismantling the federal government, yanking support for poor and working-class Americans, and emboldening extremism have been among his accomplishments so far.

Turns out life doesn’t just imitate art
— sometimes it borrows the script, reboots it with National Guard checkpoints and streams it live from Los Angeles.
Case in point:
A Day Without a Mexican,
the cheeky 2004 sci-fi satire from Mexican filmmakers Sergio Arau and Yareli Arizmendi,
in which California wakes up to find every person of Latino descent has vanished into a mysterious haze,
leaving Angelenos panicking over who’s going to mow the lawns and run …

The Outrageous 20-Year-Old Movie That Predicted Trump’s America
In 2004 ‘A Day Without a Mexican’ was intended to be a political satire. In 2025 it seems all too real. Plus, Joel Grey auctions off his old lederhosen (and some nudes!) TikTok star Khaby Lame demands $1.2 million to talk, and Chet Hanks is a no-show at his book reading.