What happened
The Trump administration yesterday appealed a federal judge’s rejection of its efforts to force California to set aside 20,000 ballots it claims could be cast by “likely noncitizens.” The Justice Department is also “issuing federal grand jury subpoenas to local election officials” in the state, The New York Times said, “intensifying” the administration’s effort to “tighten its grip on the midterm elections” and “portray elections in Democratic states as rigged against Republicans.” 

Who said what
The Trump administration’s “heated election war” on California shows “no signs of slowing down despite multiple court orders rejecting” its efforts, the Los Angeles Times said. DOJ leadership directed California federal prosecutors to “pursue criminal subpoenas of state and local officials” shortly after U.S. District Judge David Carter rejected the ballot sequestration, Bloomberg News said. If the executive branch “can discount votes and threaten an ongoing election due to unproven allegations, then our democracy is in danger,” Carter said in his Wednesday night ruling.

What next?
Election experts said the Trump administration’s “unrelenting” focus on alleged voter fraud is intended to “sow confusion and suspicion about an election in which the Republican Party is poised to lose ground, in part so they can reject the outcome,” the L.A. Times said. But the courts have “consistently rebuffed” those attempts and are expected to ”continue to do so through Nov. 3 and after.” 

What happened
Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, last night said it had suspended all deposits and withdrawals while it investigates a “security incident” with an “estimated total impact” of $6.3 billion. “It does look like a hack,” founder Changpeng Zhao (pictured above) said on social media. It also “appears to be by far the largest theft of digital currencies in history,” said The Washington Post. 

Who said what
“User funds are completely safe” and “Binance will cover all losses,” a spokesperson said. The company said it and its partners had managed to freeze about $3 billion of stolen assets so far. But news of the “biggest crypto heist ever” could “make investors rethink the risks of owning digital assets,” Reuters said. “Mere hours” before Zhao disclosed the breach, The Wall Street Journal said, “prediction-markets platform Polymarket disclosed its own hack, where at least $2.6 million in user funds were drained from the company’s accounts.”

What next?
Binance said an initial investigation suggested the breach involved a compromised laptop belonging to one of its engineers, and it was working “around the clock” to secure and “trace affected assets.” Cybersecurity research firms TRM Labs and Pangolin Intelligence said the likely culprits were North Korea’s TraderTraitor hackers. So this “largest bank heist in human history,” TRM’s Ari Redbord said, is also a “major national security issue.” 

A California startup has used AI to create and test a tailor-made virus it hopes can fight off a bacterial infection. It has the potential to help people fight disease without worsening antibiotic resistance.

Researchers at Radical Numerics administered an AI-designed bacteriophage, or bacteria-killing virus, to a patient “suffering from a deadly bacterial infection,” said The New York Times. If the phage successfully kills the antibiotic-resistant microbes, the FDA-approved experiment could “point to a new way to use AI in medicine.”

Phage therapy existed long before AI. Phages can “target particular bacteria with remarkable specificity, sparing beneficial bacteria such as those in the gut that support digestion,” Radical Numerics said in a technical paper. But the process can be time-consuming, screening “existing phage collections for effective candidates” to fight specific bacterial samples, then searching for new phages if none work.

Using AI instead can “lead to rapid on-demand generation of phages that meet patient requirements,” said The Independent. This speeds up the “timeline for treatment.”

“If it works, that’s incredible,” said Michael Baym, a microbiologist at Harvard University, to the Times. “My impulse is to be skeptical.” 

It may take days or weeks to know if the Radical Numerics phages, designed with its Omnii AI model, succeed. “We intend to publish our scientific findings through peer-reviewed research,” company CEO Eric Nguyen told the Times, “with any future disclosure of clinical details subject to appropriate consent.”