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Mayor Zohran Mamdani keeps talking about Israel while ignoring concerns in the Big Apple.

It has been four years since the Padres made the blockbuster trade with the Washington Nationals for superstar outfielder Juan Soto, and they’re still facing the ramifications of it. Former Major League Baseball executive Jim Bowden appeared as a guest on Foul Territory on Wednesday afternoon and took a shot at the team for mortgaging...

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Secret Service Official Sounds Alarm: "Threat Environment Highest Ever" As Assassination Attempts Explode

The threat environment facing individuals under U.S. Secret Service protection, including President Trump, is the highest the agency has ever recorded, a senior official said during a background briefing with reporters, according to CNBC.

Getty Images

"What we're seeing now is something I've never seen before," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity ahead of a public briefing.

The Secret Service has logged roughly 10,000 cases involving threats against government officials, including Supreme Court justices, so far in 2026 - a 40% increase from the same period a year earlier.

"They're increasing in volume and complexity," the official warned. The agency has also recorded a tenfold increase in mental-health commitments of individuals suspected of threatening protectees.

The remarks landed a week after Justice Amy Coney Barrett told a House subcommittee that threats against her and her colleagues on the Court have risen sharply.

Why They're Briefing Now

The timing is not incidental. The briefing came ahead of Friday's rescheduled White House Correspondents' Association dinner at the Waldorf Astoria, which Trump is expected to attend.

It needed rescheduling because of what happened at the last one. In April, a man carrying a shotgun, a handgun and knives stormed a security checkpoint at the Washington Hilton during the dinner, with the president in attendance, before being apprehended. Cole Tomas Allen now faces charges of attempting to assassinate the president.

That was not an isolated event. On May 4, a man was wounded in a firefight with Secret Service personnel near the Washington Monument. Three weeks later, on May 23, a gunman approached the White House while Trump was inside the residence, drew a firearm and discharged multiple rounds before being fatally shot by agents. In February, Secret Service and local police shot and killed a man armed with a shotgun who had breached a secure perimeter at Mar-a-Lago.

Four incidents in six months, at four separate protected sites. That is the ledger behind the 40% figure.

The Butler Problem

The current alarm builds on two assassination attempts in 2024. On July 13 of that year, gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, killing attendee Corey Comperatore and seriously wounding two others.

An Office of Inspector General report found that the Secret Service missed more than 100 radio transmissions from local law enforcement about a suspicious individual - now believed to be Crooks - armed with a rangefinder and rifle. Agents failed to relay critical warnings, establish proper joint communications, or secure the rooftop vantage point.

Those findings describe a catastrophic operational breakdown. They do not describe complicity, and the OIG made no such finding. But for the family of the man who died there, the distinction has offered cold comfort.

Comperatore's widow, Helen Comperatore, made headlines last week when she suggested the attempt on Trump's life was "an inside job."

"I believe he was working with somebody," she told NewsNation. "I believe it was an inside job, inside the government somewhere." No investigation has produced evidence supporting that claim, and the agency has attributed the failures to breakdowns in communication and planning.

Two months after Butler, a Secret Service officer fired at another gunman, Ryan Routh, who had concealed himself in shrubbery near the perimeter of Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida. Routh was convicted in Florida federal court last September of attempting to assassinate the president, among other charges, and is serving a life sentence.

The Problem Above The Perimeter

The concern growing fastest inside the agency is one that walks past every countermeasure it has spent a century building. Drones approach from outside conventional security perimeters and cannot be screened, wanded, or turned away at a checkpoint.

The scale is no longer theoretical. The FBI said this week it seized more than 700 illegal drones and detected roughly 1,600 in total across the eleven U.S. stadiums hosting World Cup matches - venues holding tens of thousands of people at a time.

Secret Service Director Sean Curran has said the agency is examining "kinetic solutions - something that we haven't done before," and has pushed its technology division to move faster. The OIG's Butler review separately faulted the agency's counter-drone training and preparedness, a gap it has since worked to close.

The Foreign File

More recently, Israel shared intelligence with the U.S. indicating a fresh Iranian plot to assassinate Trump, according to the Wall Street Journal. Iran has for years publicly vowed retaliation for the 2020 killing of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qassem Soleimani, and the ongoing war has sharpened concern about foreign actors targeting the president.

U.S. Secret Service Director Sean Curran testifies during the House Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee hearing in the Rayburn building in Washington, April 16, 2026. Tom Williams | CQ-Roll Call, Inc. | Getty Image Tyler Durden Wed, 07/22/2026 - 18:00

We're fall-ing for these Nordstrom Anniversary Sale finds.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed away California's share of future casino revenue in a new 25-year gaming compact with the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe, a move critics say is yet another example of the state surrendering billions of dollars in potential gaming revenue.

The suspect got into the car around 4:15 a.m. July 11 on Prospect Avenue near Bedford Avenue in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens and threatened the 21-year-old driver, authorities said.

Analysts warned it could become difficult for Tesla to keep up with its recent capital-spending pace.

During Fox's four-hour World Cup Final pregame coverage, the on-air talent got the full New York experience.

It was then Baty took an indirect route to Joey Ortiz’s fly ball that should have been the third out.

The preliminary results of an independent autopsy of 18-year-old Nolan Wells have been shared with the public, after famed civil rights attorney Ben Crump and Wells’ heartbroken parents, Christine and Elmore Wonsley, flew their son’s body over 800 miles to Washington, DC, for an independent opinion on Wells’ untimely death. In a press conference at...

DARPA's 'ECHO' Project: A Computer System That Declares You A Bio Threat - With No Physical Evidence

Authored by Jon Fleetwood via JonFleetwood.com,

In 2018, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) proposed building a portable computer system allegedly capable of determining whether a person had been exposed to biological or chemical threats - including weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and their precursors.

Even with no physical evidence.

DARPA outlined the proposal in Broad Agency Announcement HR001118S0023 for a program known as ECHO (Epigenetic CHaracterization and Observation).

DARPA proposed accomplishing this by comparing purported changes inside the person's own biology against a government-built reference library and algorithmically identifying both the alleged threat and when the exposure supposedly occurred.

Viewed alongside DARPA's broader pandemic-era research portfolio, the proposal also raises a larger question explored by this publication's In Silico Theory: as governments increasingly replace direct observation with computational models, reference libraries, and algorithmic determinations, where does objective evidence end and computer-generated conclusions begin?

It also raises an immediate practical question.

If an algorithm operating on a government-controlled reference library determines that someone was exposed to a dangerous biological or chemical threat without physical evidence, what meaningful mechanism exists for independently verifying - or successfully challenging - that determination?

SAM.gov search results associated with DARPA solicitation HR001118S0023 identify at least $53.8 million in awards, including a $49.2 million contract awarded to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and a $4.5 million contract awarded to Arizona State University.

The Core Capability

Rather than searching for the biological or chemical agent itself, ECHO proposed "identifying" alleged long-lasting biological signatures left behind after an exposure.

DARPA described the objective:

"utilize an individual's epigenome to reveal their history of exposure to weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and WMD precursors."

The solicitation explains why DARPA believed this was possible:

"the epigenome is persistent and detectable even when physical evidence has been erased."

That sentence is arguably the centerpiece of the entire program.

The proposed system was designed to continue generating exposure determinations long after the original biological or chemical material was no longer available for direct examination.

Epigenetics is the study of purported chemical modifications associated with DNA that researchers say can change in response to biological and environmental influences without altering a person's genetic code.

A Government-Built Exposure Library

To accomplish that objective, DARPA instructed performers to create what it called the ECHO Signature Panel (ESP) - a centralized library containing purported epigenetic signatures associated with specific exposures.

Contractors were required to generate signatures for a minimum of 21 exposure conditions, including mandatory biological threat agents and additional chemical, radiological, explosive, and related materials.

Future unknown samples would then be compared against that growing reference panel.

DARPA explained the process:

"The developed algorithms will need to compare an unknown exposure against the ESP to identify the specific exposure, and when the individual was exposed."

In other words, the proposed system would not simply measure biology.

It would compare an individual's biological patterns against a government-built reference library and output a determination regarding both the nature and timing of an alleged exposure.

The Computer Makes The Determination

The solicitation envisioned an almost completely automated process.

DARPA required:

"no human intervention between the time the sample is introduced and results pertinent to exposure and timing is provided."

Insert the sample.

Run the algorithms.

Receive the determination.

The individual would not be interpreting raw laboratory findings.

The system itself would produce the conclusion.

When The Person Becomes The Evidence

Traditional forensic investigations often rely on recovering the biological or chemical agent itself.

ECHO proposed something different.

According to the solicitation, the system was intended to continue identifying exposure after the physical evidence had been erased by relying instead on computational comparison against stored biological signatures.

That architecture raises an obvious question.

If the original biological or chemical material no longer exists, and the determination instead comes from an algorithm comparing an individual's biology against a government-controlled reference library, how would an ordinary person independently verify - or meaningfully challenge - that conclusion?

Could the system be weaponized or used fraudulently?

The document itself does not answer that question.

Instead, it focuses on improving the speed, automation, and reliability of the computational determination.

DARPA Anticipated Attempts To Defeat The System

One small line buried within the solicitation is especially revealing.

Among the categories requiring special handling, DARPA listed:

"Potential procedure to evade ECHO Signature Panel identification."

The agency was not merely interested in creating exposure signatures.

It was already contemplating how those signatures - and the identification system built around them - might be circumvented.

Bottom Line

Much of the discussion surrounding ECHO focuses on epigenetics.

That risks obscuring what the solicitation actually proposed.

At its core, ECHO described a government-built computational system designed to determine whether an individual had been exposed to specified biological or chemical threats by comparing representations of that person's biology against a centralized signature library - even after the underlying physical evidence was gone.

Whether such a system could perform as intended is a separate scientific question.

The more immediate journalistic question is what follows if such algorithmic determinations are relied upon in military, intelligence, public-health, or legal settings.

When there is no physical evidence and the conclusion rests on a proprietary reference library and algorithmic comparison, what avenues exist for independent verification or meaningful challenge?

What happens to the person after the algorithm determines they've been exposed?

And if those algorithmic determinations are ever used to justify quarantine, criminal investigation, military action, employment decisions, travel restrictions, or other government action, what protections exist for the person the computer has already declared was exposed?

Follow Jon Fleetwood on Instagram and X, and subscribe at JonFleetwood.com. (h/t Modernity.news)

Tyler Durden Wed, 07/22/2026 - 17:40

What a killer sight.

Rescued from a minimal theatrical release with a surprisingly popular stint on Paramount+, Wardriver might be the hacker noir you've been looking for.

Slugging in sunscreen.

The House adopted a Republican-only $95 billion budget proposal, a long-shot effort to fund the Iran war and other White House priorities over objections from Democrats and a few GOP holdouts.

In a letter exclusively shared with The Post Wednesday, Republican members of the state Assembly are calling for a hearing to examine whether New York voter rolls may have been exposed to the same errors in the Garden State where a software error by a contractor allegedly led thousands of people to be signed up...

New Jersey is facing questions about why voter registration data submitted during applications for drivers' licenses or identification wasn't screened by the state before some 6,600 noncitizens were put into the voter rolls.

It’s tomato time. 

Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman celebrated the 100th anniversary of Babe Ruth’s legendary baseball catch dropped from an airplane— declaring it a part of New York’s “rich...