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Hundreds of people have rallied outside a New York City courtroom to demand the release of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, whose arrest over the weekend sparked condemnation and fears of a crackdown on free speech in the United States. The demonstrators gathered on Wednesday outside Manhattan’s federal court for the first formal hearing in Khalil’s case, as he faces possible deportation for his activism. “Release Mahmoud Khalil now!” they chanted. During the brief hearing, Khalil’s lawyer Ramzi Kassem said his client had been allowed just one call with his legal team from the detention centre where he is being held…

Manus, the viral AI “agent” platform from Chinese startup Butterfly Effect, has had an unintended side effect: raising the profile of another AI tool called Browser Use. Browser Use, which aims to make websites more accessible for agentic applications that perform tasks on a user’s behalf, has experienced explosive growth in the past week. Daily downloads more than quintupled from around 5,000 on March 3 to 28,000 on March 10, co-creator Gregor Zunic told TechCrunch. “The past few days have been really wild,” Zunic said via DM. “We are the biggest trending repository [on GitHub], got loads of downloads [and]…

Many of Trump’s efforts to reshape the federal government have been challenged in court, often by employee unions or Democrat-led states that argue such decisions fall to Congress. Some have faced temporary restraining orders or legal setbacks, while others have won short-term victories. Nearly all the cases are still navigating their way through the federal court system. In addition, some federal employees have filed complaints directly with the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), a panel that enforces worker rights within the government. Last week, a judge blocked Trump’s efforts to fire the chair of the MSPB. On Wednesday, one of…

Pentera, a late-stage startup selling technology in the automated security validation space, has secured $60 million in a Series D funding round led by Evolution Equity Partners. Pentera said Farallon Capital Management also took an equity stake, bringing its total funding to $250 million. Pentera’s technology enables security teams to emulate adversarial techniques, identify exploitable security gaps, and prioritize remediation efforts.  The platform supports Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM), a framework designed to address the increasing complexity of cyberattacks, including those accelerated by AI-driven tactics. In a note announcing the new financing, Pentera said it has enjoyed rapid growth since…

Montreal, Canada – In his first speech as Canada’s prime minister-designate, Mark Carney delivered what observers have described as a stunning statement. “I know that these are dark days,” Carney told a room full of supporters on Sunday after he won the race to lead the governing Liberal Party. “Dark days brought on by a country we can no longer trust.” The country in question? An ally with which Canada shares the world’s longest undefended land border and, until recently, seemingly unshakeable ties: the United States. “That is jaw-dropping in the broader context,” Jon Parmenter, a history professor at Cornell University…

BoC also said it would “proceed carefully with any further changes” to rates given inflationary pressures from tariffs.The Bank of Canada has trimmed its key policy rate by 25 basis points to 2.75 percent and raised concerns about inflationary pressures and weaker growth stemming from trade uncertainty and President Donald Trump’s tariffs. The bank on Wednesday also said it would “proceed carefully with any further changes” to rates given the need to assess both the upward pressures on inflation from higher costs and the downward pressures from weaker demand. The bank’s stance, which some economists said could be a signal…

Security researchers at Mandiant have discovered a series of custom backdoors deployed on end-of-life Juniper Networks Junos OS routers by a Chinese cyberespionage group that has historically targeted network devices. According to Mandiant documentation, the backdoors were planted on end‑of‑life hardware and software and included bypasses for Junos OS’s veriexec subsystem, a kernel‑based file integrity protection mechanism. Technical analysis shows that the attackers gained privileged access through legitimate credentials, entering the FreeBSD shell via the Junos OS CLI. Once inside, they employed process injection techniques to avoid triggering veriexec alerts.  “The backdoors had varying custom capabilities, including active and passive…

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Agriculture Department is ending two pandemic-era programs that provided more than $1 billion for schools and food banks to purchase food from local farmers and producers. About $660 million of that went to schools and childcare centers to buy food for meals through the Local Foods for Schools program. A separate program provided money to food banks. In Maine, the money allowed the coastal RSU 23 school district to buy food directly from fisherman, dairy producers and farmers for school meals, said Caroline Trinder, the district’s food and nutrition services director. “I think everyone can…

Back in 2019, Microsoft open-sourced Dapr, a new runtime for making building distributed microservice-based applications easier. At the time, nobody was talking about AI agents yet, but as it turns out, Dapr had some of the fundamental building blocks for supporting AI agents built-in from the outset. That’s because one of Dapr’s core features is a concept of virtual actors, which can receive and process messages, independently from all the other actors in the system. Today, the Dapr team is launching Dapr Agents, its take on helping developers build AI agents by providing them with a lot of the building…

Identity and risk management startup 360 Privacy this week announced raising $36 million in equity investment from FTV Capital. Founded in 2019, 360 Privacy has built a digital executive protection platform that scrapes the surface, deep, and dark web in real-time to identify leaked personally identifiable information (PII) and remove it. The company focuses on protecting enterprises, their executives, and high net worth individuals from threats across the internet, by removing their personal information from broker sites and continuously scanning the web to mitigate risks. According to 360 Privacy, its platform can reduce the overall attack surface, helps mitigate and…