Malta’s bays ‘becoming alien worlds’, says leading marine biologist
How BBC Eye built a multi-agent AI system to sift through ten thousand Russian social media posts
Reuters Institute – “The system allowed a team of OSINT specialists, reporters and computational journalists to accelerate their investigation of Russian nationalists. Any journalist who’s done online investigations knows there’s simply too much evidence for one human to ever collect or investigate. Too often, we are overwhelmed with a flood of information:
tens of thousands of social media posts, images and other media. Our team from BBC Eye, which works on original documentary investigations from around the world, wanted to see if AI could help solve this problem. We opted for AI agents – a collection of large language models (LLMs) that can coordinate and execute multi-step tasks under human supervision.
When connected to external environments such as the Internet or databases, these agents can fetch and analyse relevant social media content at scale, performing work that our team might otherwise not have the time to undertake. We used this approach as part of a recent published investigation on Russia’s rising nationalist vigilante movement, building a multi-agent AI system we named Haystack to help us explore new emerging forces in daily Russian life.
The team included BBC Eye’s open-source investigators, who are specialists in gathering and analysing public information, and Russia-focused reporters, along with help from computational journalists at Stanford University…”
Government Seeks to Resume Taxpayer Info Sharing With ICE
Trevor Sikes, “Government Seeks to Resume Taxpayer Info Sharing With ICE” (Tax Notes, June 16, 2026):
An injunction against the sharing of taxpayer data between the IRS and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was improperly granted and is hindering criminal law enforcement efforts, according to the Justice Department.
In its June 12 appellate brief to the First Circuit in CEDC v. Bessent, the government defended the IRS’s disclosure of taxpayer information to ICE under a data sharing agreement and argued that the district court abused its discretion in putting a stop to the sharing.
Along with Center for Taxpayer Rights v. IRS, No. 26-5006 (D.C. Cir.), this is the second injunction against the sharing of taxpayer information between the agencies that the government is looking to get overturned.
What We Know About Billionaire Peter Thiel’s Secret ‘Dialog’ Society
Forbes: “A leak of private information purportedly related to an ultra-secret society called “Dialog” founded by PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel has revealed the inner workings of an elite group to which hundreds of global leaders, business executives and billionaires belong.
- The documents, examined and revealed by Wired this week, show Thiel and investor Auren Hoffman co-founded Dialog in 2006 as a private, invitation-only and “bipartisan” network of influential people in technology, politics, academia, finance, government and beyond.
- Dialog describes itself as a place for off-the-record relationships among leaders from different fields and ideological backgrounds, and the group hosts at least one in-person retreat per year at lavish locations like the Ritz-Carlton Dove Mountain in Arizona, the Ritz-Carlton in Santa Barbara, California and the San Clemente Palace in Venice.
- The retreats include moderated sessions for attendees (who are promised nothing they say will leave the room) with names like “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” “Navigating WWIII,” and “How’s Your Sex Life?”
- The leak, first revealed by the Swiss hacktivist maia arson crimew, revealed registration records were hidden within the publicly-available code of the group’s poorly-secured website—dialog.org—and for every person, Dialog lists a membership status, each retreat they’ve attended, a biography, political affiliation, a home city and a private access token, which functions as login credentials.
- Dialog has been described as Bilderberg (an off-the-record gathering of political and business elite) meets Silicon Valley salon…”
See also The Hollywood Reporter – Hollywood Names Surface in Peter Thiel-Backed, Invite-Only Society. Ranks of his group, Dialog, appear to include several prominent figures in media and entertainment who’ are put in the same room as C-suite execs and political titans during closed-door annual retreats. The group is planning an expansion.
Trump OMB Shifted Secret Service Funds to Build His Ballroom
NOTUS – Records show that the White House Office of Management and Budget last week quietly apportioned $352 million from Trump’s tax cuts law, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, for “White House Security Measures.” The tax law, which passed with Republican-only votes last summer before Trump tore down the East Wing of the White House and began construction of a ballroom, states that the funding can only be used for “United States Secret Service resources, including personnel, training facilities, programming, and technology,” as well as other personnel costs. It’s not clear exactly what the funds will be used for.
Asked to explain the transfer on Wednesday, an OMB official brought up the ballroom unprompted and said its construction will be funded by private donors….The administration maintains the funds are being directed in a manner consistent with the law, and that the Secret Service needs the money to upgrade security at the White House complex.
It also argues the funding is necessary given recent failed attacks targeting Trump, including one at the UFC match this past weekend and the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting earlier this year. However, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle suspect the funds are going toward construction of the ballroom, which is still being challenged in federal court…
