Juan Vargas, a congressman, says he’s working to reunite the third-grader with loved ones

Relatives of an eight-year-old Haitian boy who was taken into custody by federal immigration authorities in California are unable to locate the child, according to a Democratic lawmaker who described the case as “despicable”.

Video obtained by NBC News shows the boy being led away by three armed officials after he was summoned to what his family said was a routine immigration appointment in San Diego on 4 November.

Le 7 novembre, le BibliObservatoire vivant accueillait le collectif Nouveaux Voisins pour un atelier consacré aux écosystèmes riverains et à la création d’un herbier collectif. Une invitation à observer autrement les berges de Verdun, à découvrir les relations écologiques qui façonnent le territoire et à imaginer de nouvelles façons de partager et de prendre soin du vivant.

Apprendre à regarder ce qui pousse autour de nous

En ce frais samedi de novembre, les arbres et les plantes ont déjà pris leurs couleurs de l’automne avancé. Les fleurs se font plus rares, mais il en reste !, les tiges sèchent, les feuilles tombent encore et les graines attendent leur prochaine saison. Pourtant, les berges du fleuve Saint-Laurent demeurent pleines de vie, de traces et d’histoires à découvrir.

C’est dans ce décor automnal que le BibliObservatoire vivant (BOV), en collaboration avec les Bibliothèques de Verdun et installé près des berges à proximité de l’îlot Gallagher, a accueilli le collectif Nouveaux Voisins pour un atelier consacré aux écosystèmes riverains et à la production d’un herbier collectif. L’activité s’inscrivait dans une journée intitulée Cultiver le commun, outiller le vivant, organisée avec les collectifs Nouveaux Voisins et Entremise autour d’une question commune : comment prendre soin des milieux que nous partageons?

L’invitation de Nouveaux Voisins était toute simple : sortir du pavillon, parcourir les abords du site et les berges, observer les végétaux et recueillir quelques spécimens, une sorte de bouquet, pour s’étonner déjà de la biodiversité et pour tenter de mieux comprendre les plantes qui composent notre environnement immédiat.

La poésie de l’herbier allait nous ouvrir sur un paysage plus vaste. En observant les plantes, nous étions amenés à nous demander comment l’histoire d’un territoire façonne notre rapport à la nature et la manière dont les espèces y cohabitent.

Les plantes racontent l’histoire des territoires

Au début de l’atelier, on a attiré l’attention des participant.es sur cette idée : la végétation que nous observons aujourd’hui n’est pas un paysage figé. Elle est le résultat d’une histoire faite de transformations, de déplacements, d’introductions et de multiples interactions écologiques.

Distinguer les plantes indigènes des espèces introduites peut être utile, mais cette distinction ne suffit pas à comprendre les milieux vivants. Les plantes circulent, s’implantent ici et là, disparaissent parfois; elles peuvent aussi établir de nouvelles relations avec les autres espèces. Leur présence témoigne dans certains cas des interventions humaines, des pratiques d’aménagement et des changements environnementaux. L’enjeu n’est donc pas simplement de reconnaître les plantes qui « viennent d’ici » ou celles qui ont été, en quelques sorte, « naturalisées » ou qui sont « envahissantes », mais de comprendre les relations écologiques complexes qu’elles développent et entretiennent avec leur milieu.

Cette perspective invite à dépasser une conception de la nature comme un ensemble d’éléments isolés qu’il suffirait d’identifier ou de classer. Elle propose plutôt de considérer les écosystèmes comme des milieux dynamiques, avec leurs trajectoires et des interdépendances.

Ainsi, pour réfléchir à la biodiversité et à l’aménagement de nos espaces communs, il faut s’intéresser non seulement aux caractéristiques des espèces, mais aussi à leur provenance, à leurs trajectoires biographiques et aux relations qu’elles tissent dans la durée.

Un herbier pour observer, nommer et partager

Après cette introduction, les participant. es ont été invité.es à explorer les environs du pavillon. Guidés par leur curiosité et accompagnés par l’équipe de Nouveaux Voisins, ils et elles ont parcouru les espaces végétalisés à la recherche de feuilles, de tiges, de fleurs séchées, de graines et d’inflorescences. Même à l’automne, lorsque plusieurs plantes herbacées entrent en dormance, le paysage s’offre avec une surprenante diversité de formes, de textures et de couleurs. Les spécimens récoltés ont ensuite été disposés sur une grande surface commune, transformée progressivement en herbier collectif.

On y retrouvait notamment des asters, des verges d’or, des asclépiades, des graminées, des chardons, des feuilles d’arbres comme celles du catalpa ou de différents érables et différentes structures végétales porteuses de graines. Certains spécimens étaient identifiés, d’autres suscitaient des questions et des échanges. Ce travail de collecte et de mise en commun a permis de ralentir et d’éveiller le regard. Une feuille devient l’occasion d’examiner ses nervures. Une fleur séchée, comme celle de l’ombellifère, révèle une architecture adaptative insoupçonnée. Une graine invite à réfléchir aux mécanismes de dispersion et aux cycles saisonniers.

Observer devient alors une manière d’apprendre à habiter un lieu ou de renouer avec lui. L’herbier n’est pas seulement une collection de végétaux. Il devient un support de discussion, un outil de découverte et une représentation collective de la biodiversité locale.

Il permet aussi de partager des connaissances, comme un marché public des savoirs, où l’on retrouve toujours quelqu’un qui a un récit, une expérience ou un complément d’informations : les noms des plantes, les souvenirs associés à certaines espèces, les observations des promeneur.euses ou les explications apportées par les personnes qui connaissent plus intimement le territoire et ses saisons.

La biodiversité : une histoire de relations

L’atelier a également permis d’aborder une question de la plus haute importance : qu’entend-on exactement par biodiversité? On associe souvent la biodiversité au nombre d’espèces présentes dans un milieu. Pourtant, elle recouvre une réalité beaucoup plus complexe. Elle comprend la diversité des espèces, mais aussi la diversité génétique au sein de celles-ci, la diversité des écosystèmes et les interactions qui les relient.

Une plante ne vit jamais seule. Elle entretient des relations avec les organismes du sol, les insectes, les oiseaux et les autres végétaux. Elle peut offrir du nectar, produire des graines, servir d’abri ou participer à la régulation de certaines conditions environnementales. Or, les plantes indigènes jouent souvent un rôle particulièrement important dans ces réseaux écologiques, non seulement parce qu’elles sont mieux adaptés mais aussi parce que certaines espèces d’insectes et d’autres organismes dépendent étroitement d’elles.

Dans les milieux urbains, cette réflexion prend une importance particulière. Les espaces verts sont souvent fragmentés, aménagés et soumis à de nombreuses pressions. Les berges du Saint-Laurent constituent ainsi des lieux précieux pour observer les relations entre les espèces, les activités humaines et les transformations du territoire. Et donc, on retient que prendre soin de la biodiversité, c’est prendre soin des relations qui rendent la vie possible.

De l’herbier à la grainothèque : faire circuler le vivant

L’expérience de l’herbier collectif amène également une réflexion sur les possibilités de prolonger l’activité au-delà de l’observation et de la documentation des plantes. Et si le BibliObservatoire vivant devenait aussi un lieu de circulation et de partage du vivant?

Les grainothèques, déjà présentes dans plusieurs bibliothèques publiques, offrent une piste particulièrement intéressante. Elles permettent aux citoyen.nes d’échanger librement des semences, de découvrir différentes variétés végétales et de participer à leur préservation. Dans une perspective écologique, elles pourraient également contribuer à faire connaître les plantes indigènes et à favoriser leur présence dans les jardins des habitant.es, dans leurs cours, dans les espaces collectifs, en privilégiant des semences de provenance locale appropriée.

Mais le partage de semences indigènes comporte certains défis. Plusieurs espèces ont besoin de traverser une période de froid et d’humidité avant de pouvoir germer. Ce processus, appelé stratification froide, reproduit certaines conditions hivernales nécessaires à la levée de dormance des graines. Il faut donc parfois leur faire vivre une sorte d’hiver artificiel, notamment au réfrigérateur, avant de pouvoir les semer. Les exigences varient toutefois selon les espèces : certaines n’ont pas besoin de stratification, tandis que d’autres nécessitent des conditions particulières qui s’ajoutent, comme la scarification.

Cette réalité soulève une question stimulante : pourquoi ne pas imaginer, à côté d’une grainothèque, un réfrigérateur collectif consacré à la stratification des semences?

Accompagné d’informations sur les espèces, leur provenance, leurs besoins et leurs conditions de germination, un tel dispositif pourrait devenir un espace d’expérimentation et d’apprentissage collectif. Il permettrait notamment de suivre les étapes de préparation des semences et de mieux comprendre les cycles de vie des plantes indigènes.

On pourrait également envisager une bouturothèque, permettant le partage de boutures et de jeunes plants indigènes, tout en sensibilisant les participant·es aux différentes techniques de multiplication végétale.

Ces initiatives devraient naturellement s’accompagner de pratiques responsables : éviter les prélèvements non autorisés dans les milieux naturels, prévenir la propagation d’espèces envahissantes ou de maladies végétales et tenir compte des caractéristiques écologiques des lieux où les plantes seront introduites.

La grainothèque et la bouturothèque des plantes indigènes en bibliothèque pourraient ainsi devenir bien davantage que des dispositifs d’échange. Elles représenteraient de petites infrastructures communautaires de la biodiversité, associant partage de ressources, apprentissage collectif et responsabilité écologique.

Avec les livres et les laboratoires de création numérique, pourquoi ne pas imaginer une bibliothèque où circuleraient aussi des graines, avec leur frigo, puis des boutures et des connaissances pour prendre soin du vivant?

Le BibliObservatoire vivant comme espace de médiation écologique

Cette activité illustre une dimension significative du BibliObservatoire vivant : sa capacité à accueillir des formes de médiation qui dépassent le cadre traditionnel de la bibliothèque. Ici, les ressources à découvrir ne se trouvent pas uniquement dans les livres. Elles sont également présentes dans le paysage, dans les expériences des participant.es et dans les savoirs que les personnes invitées mettent en circulation.

Le territoire devient lui-même un espace de lecture. On apprend à reconnaître les signes du vivant, à interpréter les transformations saisonnières et à relier les observations à des connaissances botaniques, historiques et écologiques. Le dispositif favorise ainsi une rencontre entre savoirs scientifiques, savoirs d’expérience et apprentissages collectifs.

Cette démarche rejoint les ambitions du BibliObservatoire vivant, conçu comme une infrastructure sociale expérimentale où l’on explore de nouvelles manières de créer des liens entre les personnes, les connaissances et leur environnement. Elle rappelle également que la médiation ne consiste pas seulement à transmettre des connaissances déjà constituées. Elle peut créer les conditions pour que des questions émergent, que les observations soient confrontées et que de nouveaux savoirs ou de nouveaux possibles (comme une grainothèque et bouturothèque dédiées aux plantes indigènes) soient élaborés ensemble.

Dans cette perspective, un herbier, une grainothèque ou une bouturothèque peuvent être envisagés comme autant de dispositifs de médiation. Ils permettent de documenter, de partager, de transmettre et d’expérimenter, tout en donnant une place centrale à la participation communautaire.

Prendre soin des milieux que nous partageons

La question du soin était au cœur de cette journée. Prendre soin d’un milieu suppose d’abord de lui accorder de l’attention : remarquer ce qui pousse, comprendre ce qui change, reconnaître les interactions entre les espèces et s’interroger sur les conséquences de nos interventions. Cette attention constitue une première étape vers une responsabilité écologique partagée.

L’atelier invitait également à réfléchir à la place des humains dans les écosystèmes urbains. Les berges de Verdun ne sont pas simplement un décor naturel destiné à la promenade ou à la détente. Elles constituent un milieu vivant, façonné par une multitude d’espèces, d’usages et de décisions d’aménagement. En ce sens, fabriquer un herbier collectif est aussi un geste symbolique : rassembler des fragments du territoire pour mieux comprendre ce qui nous relie à lui.

L’expérience fait écho aux réflexions sur les communs, sur les formes de responsabilité collective qui peuvent émerger autour des espaces partagés et sur la nécessité de reconnaître les interdépendances entre les humains et les autres formes de vie.

Elle nous invite aussi à élargir notre conception du soin. Prendre soin d’un lieu ne signifie pas uniquement l’entretenir ou l’aménager pour les usages humains. Cela peut également vouloir dire préserver des habitats, respecter les cycles saisonniers, laisser certaines plantes accomplir leur cycle de vie et reconnaître la valeur écologique d’espaces qui paraissent parfois désordonnés.

Vers une bibliothèque du vivant

Avec cet atelier, le BibliObservatoire vivant poursuit son exploration d’une bibliothèque ouverte sur son environnement. Un livre de botanique peut nous apprendre à reconnaître une quenouille sur les berges. La plante, à son tour, peut nous apprendre quelque chose sur le lieu où elle pousse. À l’image de l’antilope de Suzanne Briet, elle peut devenir un document vivant lorsqu’on l’observe, qu’on la décrit et qu’on garde une trace de ce qu’elle nous apprend. Cette trace devient alors une ressource pour les personnes qui reviendront au même endroit.

À travers l’herbier collectif, les participant.es ont composé un portrait provisoire de la biodiversité du site. Les espèces qu’on y observe varient au fil des saisons et des transformations du territoire. Ce premier portrait pourrait servir de point de départ à une démarche de science citoyenne. En revenant sur les lieux, en datant et en localisant leurs observations, les habitant·es pourraient enrichir l’herbier et comparer ce qu’ils et elles observent au fil du temps. Le phragmite qui colonise les berges gagne-t-il du terrain? Là où il s’étend, les quenouilles se maintiennent-elles? La bibliothèque pourrait rendre ces observations accessibles et inviter d’autres personnes à y contribuer.

L’herbier collectif, la grainothèque et la bouturothèque dessinent ainsi les contours d’une bibliothèque du vivant et d’un refuge écologique. On pourrait y consulter des guides pour identifier une plante, partager des semences ou des boutures et documenter ensemble ce qu’on apprend en les cultivant. La circulation des ressources et la médiation des connaissances se nourriraient ainsi des expériences menées dans le quartier et l’arrondissement.

C’est aussi une manière pour la bibliothèque de contribuer à la transition socioécologique. En donnant accès à l’information environnementale et en soutenant des pratiques collectives d’observation, d’expérimentation et de soin, en collaboration étroite avec les organismes communautaires qui sont impliqués dans cette voie, elle peut aider les habitant.es à comprendre comment leur milieu change et à choisir des gestes qui favorisent la biodiversité locale.

Et prendre soin du vivant commence déjà par apprendre à le regarder, à le comprendre et à reconnaître que nous en faisons partie.

Activité réalisée le 7 novembre 2026 au BibliObservatoire vivant, parc des Berges de Verdun, dans le cadre de la journée « Cultiver le commun, outiller le vivant », avec les collectifs Nouveaux Voisins.

New statue titled The Foot Soldier was installed on the National Mall just two days before Veterans Day

A new statue mocking Donald Trump was installed on Washington’s National Mall on Monday, this time poking fun at bone spurs that the US president was diagnosed with, which allowed him to defer the Vietnam war draft.

Just two days before Veterans Day, the gilded statue – titled The Foot Soldier – appeared near the National Gallery of Art’s Sculpture Garden. Created by the Secret Handshake, a group of anonymous artists, the statue depicts Trump sitting down while rubbing his bare foot.

Conservation group acquires former US president’s family farm with plans to transfer it to the state in 2028

Jimmy Carter’s family farm has been acquired by a group dedicated to permanently protecting the south-west Georgia land where the late former president’s conservation ethic took hold, officials announced on Monday.

A statement from the Conservation Fund said it plans to open Carter’s family farm – on about 2,458 acres (995 hectares) outside his home town of Plains, Georgia – to the public for hunting, fishing and other outdoor recreation as soon as 2027, with the group set to transfer the land to the state’s natural resources department in 2028.

Earlier doses for children, a focus on unvaccinated adults, a risk strategy based on geography – here’s how a functioning ACIP would address the measles outbreak

The US has announced three deaths associated with measles last week, among them a seven-month-old baby in New York and a postpartum woman in Pennsylvania, underscoring the need for a more aggressive vaccination approach – but US recommendations haven’t changed.

Dismantling the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) made it harder for the US to respond to the measles outbreak, with vaccine recommendations staying the same during a historic rise in cases and deaths, four former advisers say.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen pledged €10 million for search and rescue in Bulgaria on 10 November, bringing her Black Sea tour pledges to €70 million. A day earlier in Bucharest, she said the EU would back the Black Sea Maritime Security Hub, which Romania and Bulgaria are building, with €50 million.

In Varna, von der Leyen said drone strikes on ships have disrupted navigation and sent insurance costs “skyrocketing,” and blamed Russia, which she said “wants to spread fear and uncertainty in Europe.” She called free Black Sea navigation vital for Ukraine’s economy and global food security. Meanwhile, US-brokered Ukraine-Russia talks opened in Abu Dhabi the same day, with unblocking the Black Sea among Kyiv’s priorities.

From Bucharest to Varna

In Bucharest, von der Leyen said the EU had agreed with both governments to fast-track the hub and set a clear timeline. She pledged another €10 million to Romanian search and rescue.

In Varna, she welcomed Bulgaria’s request to use some funds from SAFE, the EU’s defense industry program, “to better protect Bulgaria and the Black Sea.” She did not say what Bulgaria wants to buy.

Nine ships, 34 people

Since early October, drones have hit at least nine merchant ships off the two countries, leaving 34 people dead or missing, AFP reported on 7 November. It followed the discovery of remains, most likely of six sailors, aboard the tanker Wine Trader during repairs in Varna.

Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed on 18 October that its drones had struck a large cargo ship. The Wine Trader’s Italy-based manager told Maritime.bg the footage shows his tanker.

After a call with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, von der Leyen said that “freedom of navigation in the Black Sea must be restored and preserved” and that the EU would attend the talks.

On 3 November, Zelenskyy listed Kyiv’s priorities: first, a ceasefire on energy and critical infrastructure, and second, unblocking the Black Sea. After his 9 November call with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, his office said India is ready to mediate in setting up food corridors. In his evening address, though, Zelenskyy said Russia had not supported India’s food security proposals.

Pete Hegseth said moves to impeach him over alleged abuse of power in the Iran war were 'a farce' that would fail. The US defence secretary was speaking a day after Thomas Massie, Kentucky's Republican representative, introduced eight articles of impeachment against him

• US politics: latest updates

AI companies are trying to take the only cool thing their tech has ever done, making me vaguely interested for the first time ever in the concept of open weight models, local AI, etc. Time to take out a second mortgage on the house I don't have to finance a graphics card. Anyways, let's get into it:

‘Reverse Engineer Anything’: AI Companies Crack Down on the Coolest Thing People Were Doing With AI

It was a fun few weeks while it lasted. People using both Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s Codex to do AI-powered “reverse-engineering” or decompiling are now hitting guardrails or having their accounts limited while trying to do things like unbrick their internet-of-things devices or remove surveillance ads from their smart TVs.

Several people have reported triggering “safety checks” in Claude Code that prevented them from doing AI-powered reverse engineering; a highly upvoted Reddit post in r/ClaudeCode reads “The Dream is dead. Reverse Engineer Anything (REA) is not likely to work with Claude.” A thread in the Reverse Engineer Anything Discord from last week reads, “Claude is refusing to decompile anything,” with multiple users responding saying they have hit similar walls. And X user log4j, who used OpenAI’s Codex to reverse engineer Samsung TVs, reported having their OpenAI account banned for violating its rules on “cyber abuse.” Other users said they asked Codex to reverse engineer hardware or their own code now say they have either been warned by the company or had their accounts restricted. A project called Decomp.wtf that made it easier to reverse engineer software and games has also shut down in recent days.

As we reported last month, Reverse Engineer-Anything has made it easy for people to use AI tools to hack electronics that they own and replace a manufacturer’s software or operating system with an open source or vibecoded one. People have installed new operating systems on their smart TVs, have turned baby monitors into AI assistants, have unbricked internet-of-things devices that were abandoned by their manufacturers, and have installed new software on very old hardware. At the time, I wasn’t sure how I felt about the trend, but as I’ve seen people take ownership and control back over the devices that manufacturers have purposefully bricked, turned into spyware, or have placed artificial limitations on, I have come to see AI-powered reverse engineering of electronic devices as one of the few LLM uses genuinely worth getting excited about. And so big companies have immediately taken steps to restrict this behavior.

The policy tweaks show that big AI corporations will protect other big corporations when their users find ways to use LLMs to circumvent the artificial constraints that hardware manufacturers put on their devices. AI-powered copyright circumvention is OK with big tech when it’s a massive company scraping the entire internet to build their LLMs, but is not OK when people then use those tools to liberate their internet-of-things devices. It’s not the end of AI-powered reverse engineering, but people suddenly getting locked out of their accounts for asking AI to reverse engineer their gadgets suggests that the future of this practice lies in open weight, local, and uncensored models, making it less accessible to the masses and the people who could probably benefit from it most.

Tarun Gogineni, an OpenAI engineer, tweeted that people are not supposed to have their OpenAI accounts restricted for reverse engineering: “these blocks are mostly accidental and a result of difficult decision boundaries; there is no prohibition against reverse engineering with codex. it’s getting fixed,” he tweeted.

But people who are doing AI-powered reverse-engineering suggest that they are moving away from big companies’ models to alternatives where they aren’t going to have their accounts disabled or have to figure out how to work around AI company guardrails.

“My general experience about reverse-engineering getting blocked has been more or less 100% correlated with the ‘cyber’ category blocks I have received. My take is that the lab[s] are probably under pressure to not have their models take part in some kind of criminal hacking activities and their cyber guardrails are erring on the side of being too strict,” Matt Brown, principal consultant at Brown Fine Security and someone who has been using AI to reverse-engineer devices, told 404 Media. “I am investing in hardware and trying to stay up to speed because the frontier labs guardrails will randomly change without warning on the same model. For my security research and pentesting work I really don’t want to invest tooling and energy into an ecosystem that will eventually lock me out. These guardrails on the frontier side have come at the same time as open weight models from (mostly) China are getting better and better.”

Read the full story here

More from 404

“Do you have the gun”: According to a police incident report obtained by 404 Media, a father in South Carolina asked his six-year-old daughter if she “had the gun” before he left her alone at Target for more than an hour in the middle of the night so “he could maintain his place in line” to buy Pokémon cards.

Around the web

The biggest thing going on in tech right now is Jensen Huang’s apparent affair with an executive at the data center company Megaspeed who is an alleged Chinese spy. This isn’t the type of thing we cover very closely normally, and Sam mentioned it in the newsletter yesterday, but the latest is that the company is now getting sued over this. The AI slop You Can See Everything memes are out in full force. The incel looksmaxxers have weighed in (if you don’t understand this sentence, I won’t corrupt you). So on and so forth. If you’re curious why any of this might matter, The New York Times has a scoop that the U.S. Department of Commerce killed an investigation into a Megaspeed after Nvidia intervened. Cool government we have here. Anyways, moving on.

ICEd out: The Department of Justice said that it no longer has enough attorneys available to respond to every habeas corpus challenge, and will begin letting judges rule on cases with no government opposition. Basically this suggests that ICE has detained so many people illegally that it no longer has enough attorneys to argue in these cases. Alarming, but also means that enough people are challenging their detentions that ICE is beginning to cry uncle. Also, I would normally never suggest you go watch a Bari Weiss x Ross Douthat joint, but parts of the 60 Minutes interview with Trump were SO WILD. Perhaps this guy doesn’t really stand for anything? Hmm.

Help Court Watch: Our friends over at Court Watch are doing a subscriber drive. Court Watch grabs court records off the notoriously expensive PACER document system and makes them available for free and finds extremely interesting and important cases all the time. We partner with them on a bunch of stories so go check/help them out.

Enough: The best Raspberry Pi on the market now costs $385. I remember when the whole point of a Raspberry Pi was that it cost, like, $20. This is, of course, due to the RAM/memory/everything shortage caused by AI data center buildout. If you know what people are doing with these top-end Raspberry Pis, let me know?

SLOPPED: Actors alarmed to learn that they had been replaced by AI in the Return of the Living Dead sequel they were set to star in.

DOGE’d: The government’s IT systems are really fucked up, argues our friend Karl Bode in a piece aptly called “U.S. government IT systems are completely compromised and will require a total rebuild.”

The surveillance state, now for kids: The Atlantic has a deep dive on what constant surveillance is doing to children. I haven’t had time to read the full thing yet, but have been waiting for a piece like this for a long time.

They Rickrolled a printer: … They Rickrolled a printer.

US defense company B&M Defense has tested its AA Lancer 7 high-speed interceptor drone in Ukraine and handed some of the drones to Ukrainian Defense Forces units for testing in combat conditions, Defense Express reported, citing company representatives. The drone is designed to combat aerial targets and, according to the company, can reach up to 400 km/h. Defense Express says that speed makes it a possible means of countering Russian strike drones, including Shahed-type ones. The report does not say when or where in Ukraine the tests took place, or how many drones went to the units.

The test comes as Russia shifts to faster drones. In August, Ukrainian military intelligence (HUR) told Militarnyi that Russia was producing about 3,000 jet-powered Geran-4 and Geran-5 drones a month. According to Militarnyi, the Geran-4 cruises at 350–500 km/h. That means a Geran-4 at the upper end of its cruise range would fly faster than the Lancer 7’s claimed maximum speed. B&M Defense also said it is working on interceptor drones capable of countering jet-powered aerial targets.

What the company has disclosed

According to the company, the AA Lancer 7 cruises at 180 km/h, flies for up to 17 minutes, and carries a 500-gram payload. Its range is up to 30 km, and it can operate at altitudes of up to 4 km.

B&M Defense has not disclosed detailed test results or whether the drone has intercepted any targets so far. Defense Express posted video of the drone on its Facebook page but did not say who filmed it.

Ukraine’s interceptors and Russia’s growing drone output

Ukraine, meanwhile, has scaled up interceptor deliveries to its troops. On 7 January, then-Defense Minister Denys Shmyhal said that in December–January, deliveries to the military reached an average of more than 1,500 anti-Shahed drones a day. Russia, for its part, plans further growth.

In May, Defense Express calculated from HUR’s annual production plan that Russia could make about 450 long-range drones a day by the end of 2026, decoys included. Roughly 55% of them would be strike drones.

The Council of the EU extended the EU Military Assistance Mission in support of Ukraine (EUMAM Ukraine) on 9 November for two more years, until 15 November 2028. It also decided to establish a mission presence in Ukraine.

Russia rejects any Western troops on Ukrainian soil, and Europe’s planned force for Ukraine would go in only after the fighting stops. Since 2022, EUMAM has trained Ukrainian troops within EU territory. The new presence changes where the mission works, but only partly: the Council’s release still describes the training itself as delivered in EU member states.

What the presence in Ukraine is for

According to the Council, the presence is meant to ensure “direct and effective coordination” with Ukraine’s military and international partners, so EU training keeps pace with the army’s needs. The renewed mandate will also focus on battlefield lessons, the Council said.

The Council set a budget allocation of nearly €300 million for the new mandate, below the nearly €409 million it set for 2024–2026. The release does not explain the difference.

It is not the mission’s only EU money, though. On 26 October, the Council approved €230 million in additional financing for EUMAM Ukraine from the European Peace Facility. The €230 million is part of a €6.6 billion package member states agreed on 25 September, which also foresaw reinforcing the mission in 2027, the Council said.

How the mission got here

The EU set up EUMAM on 17 October 2022 at Ukraine’s request. The Council says it has trained more than 100,000 soldiers since then.

The Kyiv idea is not new. In August 2024, then EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said member states had agreed to a small liaison coordination center in Kyiv, Euromaidan Press reported. The Council’s 2026 texts do not say whether that center was ever set up.

Then, on 28 September, EU defense ministers agreed on the first step of the mission’s strategic review: the two-year extension. The mission would also establish a coordination cell in Kyiv, the Council said. Monday’s decision, six days before the old mandate runs out, formalized the extension. The 9 November release names no city.

• Age-gap relationship generated intense scrutiny

• Hudson says clip invaded her privacy

Jordon Hudson is suing two Airbnb hosts over a Ring doorbell camera video of a bare-chested Bill Belichick. Hudson says that the 2023 clip invaded her privacy by prompting public disclosure of her relationship with the former New England Patriots head coach.

Hudson, who went on to become a public presence by Belichick’s side, says in the lawsuit that the pair were keeping their romantic relationship private when they stayed at the Boston-area rental in the summer of 2023. However, the doorbell video – which showed a shirtless Belichick stepping out of the home – emerged that fall and soon made the rounds in the media.

It was a fun few weeks while it lasted. People using both Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s Codex to do AI-powered “reverse-engineering” or decompiling are now hitting guardrails or having their accounts limited while trying to do things like unbrick their internet-of-things devices or remove surveillance ads from their smart TVs. 

Several people have reported triggering “safety checks” in Claude Code that prevented them from doing AI-powered reverse engineering; a highly upvoted Reddit post in r/ClaudeCode reads “The Dream is dead. Reverse Engineer Anything (REA) is not likely to work with Claude.” A thread in the Reverse Engineer Anything Discord from last week reads, “Claude is refusing to decompile anything,” with multiple users responding saying they have hit similar walls. And X  user log4j, who used OpenAI’s Codex to reverse engineer Samsung TVs, reported having their OpenAI account banned for violating its rules on “cyber abuse.” Other users said they asked Codex to reverse engineer hardware or their own code now say they have either been warned by the company or had their accounts restricted. A project called Decomp.wtf that made it easier to reverse engineer software and games has also shut down in recent days.

As we reported last month, Reverse Engineer-Anything has made it easy for people to use AI tools to hack electronics that they own and replace a manufacturer’s software or operating system with an open source or vibecoded one. People have installed new operating systems on their smart TVs, have turned baby monitors into AI assistants, have unbricked internet-of-things devices that were abandoned by their manufacturers, and have installed new software on very old hardware. At the time, I wasn’t sure how I felt about the trend, but as I’ve seen people take ownership and control back over the devices that manufacturers have purposefully bricked, turned into spyware, or have placed artificial limitations on, I have come to see AI-powered reverse engineering of electronic devices as one of the few LLM uses genuinely worth getting excited about. And so big companies have immediately taken steps to restrict this behavior. 

The policy tweaks show that big AI corporations will protect other big corporations when their users find ways to use LLMs to circumvent the artificial constraints that hardware manufacturers put on their devices. AI-powered copyright circumvention is OK with big tech when it’s a massive company scraping the entire internet to build their LLMs, but is not OK when people then use those tools to liberate their internet-of-things devices. It’s not the end of AI-powered reverse engineering, but people suddenly getting locked out of their accounts for asking AI to reverse engineer their gadgets suggests that the future of this practice lies in open weight, local, and uncensored models, making it less accessible to the masses and the people who could probably benefit from it most. 

Tarun Gogineni, an OpenAI engineer, tweeted that people are not supposed to have their OpenAI accounts restricted for reverse engineering: “these blocks are mostly accidental and a result of difficult decision boundaries; there is no prohibition against reverse engineering with codex. it’s getting fixed,” he tweeted. 

But people who are doing AI-powered reverse-engineering suggest that they are moving away from big companies’ models to alternatives where they aren’t going to have their accounts disabled or have to figure out how to work around AI company guardrails. 

“My general experience about reverse-engineering getting blocked has been more or less 100% correlated with the ‘cyber’ category blocks I have received. My take is that the lab[s] are probably under pressure to not have their models take part in some kind of criminal hacking activities and their cyber guardrails are erring on the side of being too strict,” Matt Brown, principal consultant at Brown Fine Security and someone who has been using AI to reverse-engineer devices, told 404 Media. “I am investing in hardware and trying to stay up to speed because the frontier labs guardrails will randomly change without warning on the same model. For my security research and pentesting work I really don’t want to invest tooling and energy into an ecosystem that will eventually lock me out. These guardrails on the frontier side have come at the same time as open weight models from (mostly) China are getting better and better.” 

Brown posted a YouTube video last week explaining how he found hidden Bluetooth commands in an internet-of-things gas monitor attached to his propane tank with the open weight model GLM 5.3. He has explained in various posts that the guardrails big companies are putting on reverse engineering are why local AI and open weight models are important.

AI-powered reverse-engineering isn’t going anywhere, but it does look like it’s going to become much harder to use the most popular frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic for it. It’s unclear how much longer it will be possible for you to open an OpenAI Codex window, ask it to find a smart TV hooked up to your network, and tell it to install a new operating system on it. Moving forward, it looks like this type of work will be best done with open source, open weight, uncensored, and local models. That’s a bummer, because one of the things that was so exciting about the Reverse Engineer-Anything trend was how easily accessible it had become.

Last month, researchers and law professors at Cornell Tech, Columbia University, and New York University published a paper about how cheap, AI-assisted reverse-engineering is challenging big manufacturers’ dominance over the devices their make, and is challenging existing intellectual property law. 

“AI systems can identify hardware components, extract firmware, decompile object code, and clone entire apps. The resulting struggle between technology vendors and reverse engineers will challenge a wide range of laws, including trade secret, copyright, anti-circumvention, computer misuse, and contract,” they write. “The law of reverse engineering was built for a world where opening a device took time, tools, and rare expertise. That friction is vanishing as agents whittle endless, precise picks for the many little locks that fill our digital lives.”

In recent days, people have started modifying older digital cameras with new, vibe-coded operating systems. In a video about hacking old cameras, the YouTuber Breno Loves Cameras explains why it’s such a big deal and why camera companies don’t like it; that same logic can be applied to any device manufacturer.

“Camera companies have this practice of keeping features to release on newer cameras, and having distinctions [in features] in camera lines,” the YouTuber Breno said in one video. “This is breaking that from those big companies, which are going to lose a lot of money if this becomes a big thing.”

 Through that lens, it’s easy to see why big companies are protecting other big companies. People finally found a thing to do with AI tools that gives consumers a bit more control over the devices they bought; it must be immediately stamped out.

“This vibe-code hacking is only called ‘reverse’ when somebody who lacks a trillion dollars is doing it,” the science fiction author Bruce Sterling tweeted. “When you ‘reverse engineer’ the entire Internet Common Crawl, you just built a nice AI model.”