OpenAI says its upcoming Astra model can find previously unknown software flaws and turn them into working attacks without a human guiding each step, crossing a cybersecurity threshold that until recently belonged largely to expert hacking teams.
It is the first model OpenAI has classified as having “Critical” cyber capabilities under its Preparedness Framework, the firm wrote in a Tuesday post.
To qualify, a model must be able to find previously unknown software flaws, known as zero-days, and develop working exploits for them across hardened real-world systems without human intervention, or devise and execute an attack from little more than a high-level goal.
In testing, Astra scored 100% on a benchmark for developing exploits from known vulnerabilities and found two previously unknown flaws while building an exploit chain on a separate internal test.
In a test designed to see whether models would “cheat” on extremely difficult or impossible hacking tasks, GPT-5.6 Sol was more likely to take prohibited shortcuts. Astra did not, while still legitimately solving some of the tasks. (OpenAI)
It also broke out of a hardened browser sandbox and executed commands on the host computer, while separately finding and combining multiple flaws in an operating system to gain root access, OpenAI said.
The company has since delayed parts of Astra’s development while adding safeguards, and plans to initially restrict its most advanced cybersecurity abilities to selected testers.
The 22nd Zurich Film Festival will honor Julianne Moore with the Golden Icon Award for her “extraordinary career” and her performance in her new film, “The Debut.”
She will be accompanied in Zurich by “The Debut” director Jesse Eisenberg. The film marks Moore’s second collaboration with Eisenberg as a director following his directorial debut “When You Finish Saving the World” (2022). It is his third feature film as a director.
When Mona Friedman (Moore) is cast in a bit part at a small community theater, she transforms from a shy, unassuming housewife into a zealous method actor willing to do anything to protect the artistic integrity of her marginal role – even if it means waging war against the show’s domineering director.
“Julianne Moore is one of the outstanding character actresses of American cinema. She possesses remarkable versatility and, time and again, manages to captivate us with her intense portrayals of the characters she plays. No matter which film we see her in, we find ourselves rooting for her characters,” Christian Jungen, CEO of the Zurich Film Festival, said. “In the wonderful film ‘The Debut,’ she delivers a brilliant performance as a woman who realizes it’s not too late to fulfill her deeply personal dream: becoming an actress. It is Julianne Moore’s love letter to her own profession – and thus the perfect film with which to thank her, with our Golden Icon Award, for so many wonderful cinematic experiences.”
Moore won an Oscar for “Still Alice” and was Oscar nominated for “Far From Heaven,” “The Hours,” “The End of the Affair” and “Boogie Nights.” She won best actress awards at Cannes for “Maps to the Stars,” at Venice for “Far From Heaven” and Berlin for “The Hours.”
Federal Reserve Board member Michael Barr said he is prepared to support interest rate hikes if inflation does not fall sufficiently.
Speaking at a banking forum in Washington, Barr stated that inflation remaining above the Fed’s 2 percent target for nearly five and a half years increases the risk of broader price pressures becoming permanent in the economy.
In his prepared speech, Barr stated, “If the trends in the data give me confidence that inflation is moderately moving toward the 2 percent target, I think we can take some more time to assess our policy stance. However, if inflation does not appear to be slowing sufficiently, we must act decisively and raise interest rates.”
Barr’s remarks come at a critical time in the US, with inflation remaining high and bond yields rising again. Barr, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, is among the permanent voting members of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which sets monetary policy.
Driven by growing concerns about developments in the Middle East, US bond yields rose again on Tuesday, with the benchmark 10-year Treasury yield reaching levels not seen since mid-January 2025.
Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh’s remarks last week, interpreted by markets as a more hawkish message regarding interest rate hikes, further strengthened expectations. Warsh’s words were interpreted as suggesting that the Fed could even raise interest rates at its next monetary policy meeting in two weeks.
Barr had supported the Fed’s decision in July to keep the policy rate stable in the 3.50-3.75 percent range. According to CME Group’s FedWatch tool, markets were pricing in a probability of a Fed rate hike this month of approximately 66 percent on Tuesday morning.
Barr said that despite high inflation, the overall outlook for the U.S. economy remains resilient.
“Consumer spending has so far remained largely resilient,” Barr said, adding, “Inflation is still very high and has been for more than five years.”
According to the latest data, headline inflation in the US stood at 3.7 percent year-on-year, while core inflation, excluding food and energy prices, was 3.3 percent.
Dozens of people are injured, and at least five dead, after US strikes hit a wedding ceremony north of the Iranian port city of Sirik. A child was among the victims. A warning some of the images may distress some viewers.
Bitcoin, being a liquidity sponge, is not uncorrelated either. Historically, major bottoms in bitcoin have coincided with renewed upswings in the credit impulse.
The indicator is now falling, according to Societe Generale, and ignoring that could prove costly for risk assets.
“Ignoring China’s recent monetary tightening could prove to be the biggest investment mistake of the decade,” Societe Generale strategist Albert Edwards said in a note discussing the decline in credit impulse.
He explained that a decline in credit creation relative to GDP in China could be a sign of an impending global slowdown, which could weigh on corporate earnings and U.S. stock prices.
Resilient $BTC?
The raw reading for the Bloomberg China Credit Impulse index stood at 20.84 points recently, the lowest since 2008, according to data source MacroMicro. Yet bitcoin surged 25% in August and topped $80,000.
The rally was characterized by strong inflows into U.S.-listed spot ETFs, an unwinding of short positions, and a broader uptrend in assets that had lagged stocks earlier this year. More recently, the ascent has stalled just under $80,000, with renewed fears of a Fed rate hike weighing on sentiment.
Two scenarios
From here, two scenarios seem plausible. In the first, bitcoin continues to climb, shrugging off the weakening China credit impulse. That wouldn’t be entirely surprising given how the market’s composition has changed. Crypto trading today is driven largely by U.S. institutional flows rather than the Chinese and South Korean retail volumes that once set the tone in the asset’s early years,. This might make bitcoin less sensitive to signals rooted in China’s domestic credit conditions.
U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said people in hospice care weren’t dying fast enough and were costing taxpayers too much money.
Rating:
Context
Kennedy did not explicitly that hospice patients cost taxpayers too much money because they received treatment for too long. Instead, he was specifically referring to instances of suspected hospice fraud in California.
In late August 2026, a claim (archived) circulated online that U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said people in hospice care weren’t dying fast enough and were costing taxpayers too much money.
For example, independent journalist Aaron Rupar shared a clip of Kennedy speaking on X and wrote, “RFK Jr complains that people in hospice aren’t dying quick enough and therefore cost too much money.”
Though Kennedy did speak about hospice care during an appearance on the Fox News program “Saturday in America” on Aug. 29, summaries such as Rupar’s on X did not accurately reflect his words.
Kennedy did not explicitly say that hospice patients cost taxpayers money because they received treatment for too long. Rather, he said hospices in California had fraudulently received federal funds, pointing to billing for patients over multiple years instead of the typical several months as one example.
In August 2026, The Associated Press reported on one incident of fraud where a California hospice billed Medicare for a healthy 71-year-old woman.
In a recording of the “Saturday in America” town hall featuring Kennedy, he said (at 52:52):
We closed down thousands of hospices in California, they didn’t have patients, they were just billing us. And the way we found them is because the patients would never die. And so, we could see, we’ve been paying for this guy for five years — usually, if you go to a hospice, it means you’ve got three months left to live — these people were never dying, they just had the patient numbers and we were being charged $6,000 a month and just paying, I think 8,000 of them, of these hospices. We’re talking about tens of billions of dollars stolen every year.
Given the above, we find claims that Kennedy said hospice patients weren’t dying fast enough and costing taxpayers money false. Instead, he was specifically referring to instances of suspected hospice fraud.
We contacted the Department of Health and Human Services to ask when it closed the 8,000 hospices Kennedy mentioned and how much money the department estimated hospice fraudsters had received and await a reply.
Medicare, the U.S. federal health insurance program for people 65 and older, covers hospice care for eligible patients. According to Medicare’s website, a patient is eligible if one or more doctors certify they are terminally ill, with a life expectancy of six months or less — not three, as Kennedy said. The insurance program covers hospice care for two initial 90-day periods and successive unlimited 60-day periods.
Vice President JD Vance’s anti-fraud task force, which President Donald Trump established in March 2026, has focused on hospice fraud through Medicare.
The Associated Press reported in August 2026 that fraudsters opened fake hospices and tricked real patients into enrolling, or stole people’s identities to bill Medicare for hospice services they did not receive.
In May 2026, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced six-month moratoriums on Medicare enrollment for hospices and home health agencies. The centers said they had worked with Vance’s anti-fraud task force to suspend federal payments to 800 hospices and home health agencies suspected of fraud in Los Angeles. The suspected fraudulent companies received $1.4 billion in Medicare payments in 2025, according to the news release.
The release noted that hospice fraud was especially prevalent in Arizona, California, Georgia, Ohio, Nevada and Texas.
California’s Department of Justice described hospice fraud as “an epidemic” in the state. The department said it carried out its own investigations into hospice fraud within Medi-Cal, California’s state-level health insurance program and that it had secured 51 “hospice related convictions” since 2021.
For further reading, Snopes routinely investigates claims about Medicare.
The Trial of Alec Baldwin, a powerful verité documentary feature for which the Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning filmmaker Rory Kennedy was granted exclusive access to the titular star in the aftermath of the 2021 accidental shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of the film Rust, has been acquired by Abramorama for a North American release and awards campaign, The Hollywood Reporter can exclusively report.
The film, for which Kennedy spent years filming Baldwin, and which features powerful footage from the set of Rust and from Baldwin’s police interrogation and the legal proceedings that followed, will open in New York on Oct. 1 at Village East by Angelika, then premiere in Los Angeles on Oct. 15 at the Laemmle Monica, and go on to a week-long Oscar-qualifying engagement at the Laemmle Noho 7 before expanding to theaters across the country.
“The Trial of Alec Baldwin doesn’t shy away from complexity or discomfort,” Karol Martesko-Fenster, CEO of AB2 Media Group and Abramorama, tells THR. “Rory and her [life and producing] partner Mark Bailey have crafted a film that goes beyond the headlines to ask hard questions about how we assign blame, process tragedy, and judge public figures in real time. We’re honored to partner with them in bringing this story to theaters.”
Adds Kennedy and Bailey, “We felt this was an important story for our times, a vital story about the state of our judicial system. Alec is an enduring and undeniably significant figure in Hollywood, and the trial surrounding Rust raised questions well beyond the events that transpired on set. Alongside Abramorama, we are eager to bring this documentary to theater audiences so that the broader public can grapple with the complex questions at the heart of the film.”
Hutchins was a 42-year-old up-and-coming cinematographer who was lensing the low-budget indie Rust, which Baldwin was starring in and a producer of, when she was killed by a prop gun that Baldwin was handed and instructed to point towards the camera. In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, which was deeply traumatizing for everyone involved, virtually no one doubted that it was a terrible accident. But soon thereafter, questions of responsibility, guilt, blame, punishment and justice began to ripple through the media, fueled by the polarizing public persona of Baldwin, a talented actor and troubled celebrity adored by some and hated by others — attitudes which come into play even at his trial.
The family of Celeste Rivas Hernandez, the teenager whom singer D4vd is accused of sexually abusing and murdering before mutilating her body last year, is calling for justice as their attorney disputes the artist’s claim of indigence in a Los Angeles courtroom this week — a claim used to justify swapping his high-powered legal team for a public defender.
“We, as a family, only want justice for Celeste and for whoever is responsible to face the full force of the law. And we thank everyone for supporting our daughter in every way,” the Rivas Hernandez family said in a statement Monday afternoon, following the latest hearing in the case against the singer, whose real name is David Anthony Burke.
Earlier Monday, Burke stunned the courtroom during a pretrial hearing when it was announced he was firing his legal team and switching to a public defender. The move, attorneys said, was because the rising star — who once opened for SZA — qualifies as indigent, a claim now being heavily contested.
Burke has swapped attorneys Blair Berk, Marilyn Bednarski and Regina Pete for incoming public defender Walid Fouad Kandeel.
Prosecutors allege D4vd was in an illegal sexual relationship with Rivas Hernandez, whom he met when she was 11 years old, and killed her after she threatened to expose the relationship and end his career — with the alleged murder occurring on April 23, 2025, just two days before the release of his debut album, Withered. A CBS Los Angeles report on his arraignment detailed the timeline further: Rivas Hernandez left her family’s Lake Elsinore home via rideshare and arrived at Burke’s Hollywood Hills residence at 10:10 p.m., with his phone and car departing north toward Santa Barbara County roughly an hour and 20 minutes later.
Dismembered remains were discovered in the trunk of a Tesla registered to the singer in Hollywood and were later identified through dental records and a matching “shhh…” finger tattoo the victim shared with D4vd. Burke is facing trial on murder, continuous sexual abuse and body-mutilation charges in connection with the April 2025 death.
The Los Angeles Police Department served a warrant at his home and found evidence in the garage consistent with dismemberment, and a worker later found the victim’s passport off a Santa Barbara County highway. His label, Darkroom/Interscope, dropped him, and he canceled the remainder of his tour. Burke was arrested in April 2026 and formally charged with first-degree murder among other counts.
Attorney Patrick Steinfeld, who is representing the Rivas Hernandez family, told The Hollywood Reporter on Tuesday that the singer has millions in three separate companies that he owns. Steinfeld sent documents from the state of Texas as evidence of his stake in the businesses
“David Anthony Burke is the owner and director of three LLCs, including entertainment, merchandising and publishing companies,” the attorney said in a statement sent to THR. “As owner, he controls the distribution of funds for these companies, so he should ‘direct’ one of his LLCs to distribute funds to him rather than claiming he’s broke and forcing taxpayers to reach into their pockets to pay for his defense.”
A five-day preliminary hearing in July produced some of the case’s most graphic disclosures — testimony about blood stains found on items in his garage, chainsaw purchases and explicit text messages with the victim, who was 13 at the time of their alleged relationship — and a judge ultimately ruled there was enough evidence to send the case to trial. L.A. County District Attorney Nathan Hochman said after the hearing that his office is undecided whether it will seek the death penalty in Burke’s case, and that two of his previous attorneys had been invited to submit a mitigation packet but had not done so as of the hearing.
Burke has pleaded not guilty to all charges. His next court date is in October.
Carole Radziwill is addressing her name appearing in the Epstein files, which will seemingly be a hot topic on the 16th season of The Real Housewives of New York City.
The Housewife used to be friends with Jeffrey Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell; Maxwell also shot the author’s photo for Radziwill’s 2007 memoir What Remains. Her connection to the Epstein files was brought up in the trailer for the upcoming season of RHONY, and she says it’s an important topic to discuss.
“Me and many, many, many more people found our names in these files, and it’s not something I shy away from because I think really it’s important to talk about it,” Radziwill said in a video shared by Vulture during a RHONY cast Q&A hosted by Andy Cohen on Tuesday. “It’s important to be transparent.”
Radziwill said that “obviously I didn’t know anything as no one, you know, 20 years ago would have known anything,” but that it’s “hard also” to grapple with the idea “that someone you knew that long ago and even called a friend at some point was a horrible, horrible person doing horrible things.”
“At first, I was really nervous, but I just think it’s an opportunity to talk about it,” Radziwill added. “There’s real victims and survivors that were brave enough to really stand up to these very, very powerful people. So, you know, not to be a downer, though.”
Radziwill is returning to the RHONY cast after previously starring on the series from season five through 10. It had previously been reported that she would be returning to the show for season 16, but only in a reduced status; however, she has regained her “Apple,” making her a full-time Housewife.
RHONY will debut its 16th season on Tuesday, Sept. 8, at 8 p.m. on Bravo. The new season arrives a little over a year after the second season of the reboot (season 15) concluded on a rocky note in February 2025.
RHONY was rebooted with a brand new cast for the show’s 14th season, following another hectic season 13. After that installment, Bravo initially planned to split RHONY into two shows — one centered around a fresh slate of women and another spotlighting the “legacy” cast. The latter idea was shelved when Peacock instead released The Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip: RHONY Legacy, a one-season project that highlighted Luann de Lesseps, Ramona Singer, Kelly Bensimon, Sonja Morgan, Dorinda Medley and Kristen Taekman on vacation.
Set on a picturesque Japanese island, the series follows Karin Shirahama, a strawberry farmer who pours everything into her land, and Lee Yubin, a city dweller whose fortunes have taken a sharp turn for the worse. A spectacularly awkward first encounter gives way to an unlikely misunderstanding that keeps the pair far closer than either expected.
Ji Chang-wook, known for “The Worst of Evil” and “The Manipulated,” plays Lee Yubin, a space planner navigating life well outside his comfort zone. Imada Mio, who appeared in “Tokyo Revengers,” takes the role of Karin Shirahama. The casting unites one of Korea’s most recognizable leading men with a prominent Japanese star, signaling the show’s deliberate cross-cultural pitch.
Behind the camera, the series is co-directed by Kim Soojung (“Semantic Error”) and Noh Youngsub (“My Lovely Liar”), with a screenplay by Lee Jaeyoon, writer of “Divorce Insurance.” It was developed and produced by CJ ENM – the Korean entertainment company behind global hits “Crash Landing on You” and “Queen of Tears” – alongside Disney, with Nippon TV serving as co-producer.
“Merry Berry Love” joins an expanding Asian originals slate on Disney+ and Hulu, which already carry Korean romantic titles including “Perfect Crown,” about a grand prince who enters a marriage of convenience with the heir to a Korean conglomerate, and “Soundtrack #1,” centered on a struggling songwriter and her best friend of 19 years.
The series streams on Disney+ and Hulu from Oct. 7.
