Are we in a literacy crisis? | Education

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We’re talking to educators with decades of experience and seeing why nobody is reading books any more. Is it fair to blame everything on technology? Are parents being present enough with their children, and what does that mean for our collective future?

Presenter: Stefanie Dekker

Guests:
Beth Gaskill – Founder of Big City Readers

Keisha Siriboe – Literacy advocate

Margaret Kunji – Former educator



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Two people die after light aircraft crash in Greater Manchester | UK News

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Two people have died after a light aircraft crash in Greater Manchester.

The crash happened in a farmland area in Littleborough, Rochdale, shortly after 11am.

Emergency services respond to the incident in Littleborough. Pic: Daniel Sloan
Image: Emergency services respond to the incident in Littleborough. Pic: Daniel Sloan
The scene of the light aircraft crash near Littleborough.
Image: The scene of the light aircraft crash near Littleborough.

Greater Manchester Police said two men were found and they were pronounced dead at the scene.

It is not believed there was anyone else on board and there were no reported injuries on the ground.

Chief Superintendent Danny Inglis said: “This is a devastating incident where two people have lost their lives and our thoughts are with their families and friends.

“We have been working closely with emergency service colleagues and partner agencies throughout the day to establish the full circumstances and we will be on scene overnight and into tomorrow.

“There will be an enhanced presence as officers and investigators comprehensively survey the area and ensure all available evidence is recovered.

“If anyone has any information, or witnessed the crash, we would urge you to get in touch with us.”

Photos shared on social media appear to show a yellow parachute partly wrapped around the base of an electricity pylon.

Emergency services respond to the incident in Littleborough. Pic: Daniel Sloan
Image: Emergency services respond to the incident in Littleborough. Pic: Daniel Sloan

There are reports that the aircraft which crashed is a Cirrus SR20, a plane which is fitted with a parachute system designed to deploy in an emergency.

The flight tracking website, flightradar24, posted a message on X showing an image of a Cirrus aircraft, believed to be involved in the accident.

It said a plane departed Birmingham Airport at 9.59am and the last signal was received at around 10.39am “south of the M62 motorway near Marsden”. It has not officially been confirmed whether this is the aircraft which crashed.

A Birmingham Airport spokesman confirmed a private light aircraft left its XLR Executive Jet Centre at around 10am on Tuesday.

Other images from the scene show a large response from the emergency services, with several fire engines, police and ambulance vehicles.

The Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) issued a statement related to the crash.

“An accident involving a light aircraft which occurred today (3 February) near Rochdale, Greater Manchester has been notified to the AAIB.

“An investigation has been launched and a multidisciplinary team of inspectors are on their way to the accident site.”



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Anti-ICE agitators set up checkpoint in Minneapolis street to stop vehicles

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Anti–Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agitators in Minneapolis have set up a makeshift street checkpoint to track federal agents, stopping vehicles and questioning drivers to determine whether they are ICE officers, video shows.

Agitators could be seen standing in the roadway near makeshift barricades and traffic cones while they stopped or flagged down passing vehicles.

In one clip, an agitator dressed in a black coat and black mask was seen approaching a stopped vehicle and directly asking the driver if they were “ICE,” before allowing the car to proceed.

“It looks like in our system that your plates come up as an ICE plate,” the agitator said to the driver.

ANTI-ICE MOBS BANKROLLED BY ‘SHADOWY INTERESTS’ PUTTING LAW ENFORCEMENT IN DANGER, CEO WARNS

Masked people stand by a wooden barricade with signs while vehicles wait on a snowy street.

Agitators at a barricade on Cedar Avenue near 34th Street as a checkpoint to vet ICE and federal immigration enforcement vehicles entering the Powderhorn neighborhood in south Minneapolis (Richard Tsong-Taatari/The Minnesota Star Tribune via Getty Images)

“That doesn’t seem like it’s the case,” he added. “I just want to come through and ask what’s up and see how you’re doing.”

The agitator also asked the driver for his name. 

“He’s clearly Somalian,” someone is also heard saying.

Journalist Jorge Ventura captured the video from the scene. Ventura asked the agitator what system they were using, pressing him on how the group were identifying vehicles and noting that the driver was not a federal agent.

MINNEAPOLIS TEACHERS UNION CHIEF ADMITS ELECTED OFFICIALS IN ANTI-ICE SIGNAL CHATS

A person in a winter jacket approaches a vehicle on a snowy residential street in Minneapolis

An anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agitator approaches a vehicle and questions the driver during a makeshift checkpoint on a residential street in Minneapolis, video shows. (X / @VenturaReport)

The agitator responded that ICE agents were renting a large number of vehicles and said the car would be taken “off the list.”

The agitator acknowledged that the encounter was being posted on social media, but said many nearby residents supported the effort. 

“A lot of the neighbors support what we’re doing,” the agitator said. “So happy to be here.”

Ventura said the agitators were stopping vehicles on Cedar Avenue, which runs through the Somali-dense Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, known as “Little Mogadishu.” He said they were stopping vehicles, checking drivers’ identification and running license plates through what they described as a “database,” adding that he did not observe any Minneapolis police officers at the scene.

DEPUTY AG DETAILS ‘MASSIVE UNDERGROUND FRAUD NETWORK’ ALLEGEDLY BEHIND MINNEAPOLIS ANTI-ICE PUSH

Masked people stand by a wooden barricade with signs while vehicles wait on a snowy street.

Agitators build a barricade on Cedar Avenue near 34th Street as a checkpoint to vet ICE and federal immigration enforcement vehicles entering the Powderhorn neighborhood in south Minneapolis. (Richard Tsong-Taatari/The Minnesota Star Tribune via Getty Images)

The activity appeared to take place entirely on a public street, with agitators effectively setting up what resembled an informal checkpoint aimed at identifying or tracking federal immigration agents operating in the city.

The Minneapolis Police Department told Fox News Digital that the roadblocks were removed. It is unclear if any arrests were made. 

“The Public Works team — with assistance from the Minneapolis Police Department — cleared debris and homemade roadblocks yesterday,” the department said. “Given the high-traffic and high-speed block of roadways on Cedar Ave., the City cleared the streets to ensure public safety for the neighborhoods and emergency vehicles.”

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The video surfaced amid heightened tensions surrounding immigration enforcement in Minnesota, as anti-ICE activists have staged repeated protests and confrontations tied to federal operations in recent weeks.

It comes after the fatal shootings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis during separate federal enforcement actions, incidents that intensified unrest and scrutiny surrounding ICE activity in the city.



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Patch Tuesday, January 2026 Edition

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Microsoft today issued patches to plug at least 113 security holes in its various Windows operating systems and supported software. Eight of the vulnerabilities earned Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” rating, and the company warns that attackers are already exploiting one of the bugs fixed today.

January’s Microsoft zero-day flaw — CVE-2026-20805 — is brought to us by a flaw in the Desktop Window Manager (DWM), a key component of Windows that organizes windows on a user’s screen. Kev Breen, senior director of cyber threat research at Immersive, said despite awarding CVE-2026-20805 a middling CVSS score of 5.5, Microsoft has confirmed its active exploitation in the wild, indicating that threat actors are already leveraging this flaw against organizations.

Breen said vulnerabilities of this kind are commonly used to undermine Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR), a core operating system security control designed to protect against buffer overflows and other memory-manipulation exploits.

“By revealing where code resides in memory, this vulnerability can be chained with a separate code execution flaw, transforming a complex and unreliable exploit into a practical and repeatable attack,” Breen said. “Microsoft has not disclosed which additional components may be involved in such an exploit chain, significantly limiting defenders’ ability to proactively threat hunt for related activity. As a result, rapid patching currently remains the only effective mitigation.”

Chris Goettl, vice president of product management at Ivanti, observed that CVE-2026-20805 affects all currently supported and extended security update supported versions of the Windows OS. Goettl said it would be a mistake to dismiss the severity of this flaw based on its “Important” rating and relatively low CVSS score.

“A risk-based prioritization methodology warrants treating this vulnerability as a higher severity than the vendor rating or CVSS score assigned,” he said.

Among the critical flaws patched this month are two Microsoft Office remote code execution bugs (CVE-2026-20952 and CVE-2026-20953) that can be triggered just by viewing a booby-trapped message in the Preview Pane.

Our October 2025 Patch Tuesday “End of 10” roundup noted that Microsoft had removed a modem driver from all versions after it was discovered that hackers were abusing a vulnerability in it to hack into systems. Adam Barnett at Rapid7 said Microsoft today removed another couple of modem drivers from Windows for a broadly similar reason: Microsoft is aware of functional exploit code for an elevation of privilege vulnerability in a very similar modem driver, tracked as CVE-2023-31096.

“That’s not a typo; this vulnerability was originally published via MITRE over two years ago, along with a credible public writeup by the original researcher,” Barnett said. “Today’s Windows patches remove agrsm64.sys and agrsm.sys. All three modem drivers were originally developed by the same now-defunct third party, and have been included in Windows for decades. These driver removals will pass unnoticed for most people, but you might find active modems still in a few contexts, including some industrial control systems.”

According to Barnett, two questions remain: How many more legacy modem drivers are still present on a fully-patched Windows asset; and how many more elevation-to-SYSTEM vulnerabilities will emerge from them before Microsoft cuts off attackers who have been enjoying “living off the land[line] by exploiting an entire class of dusty old device drivers?”

“Although Microsoft doesn’t claim evidence of exploitation for CVE-2023-31096, the relevant 2023 write-up and the 2025 removal of the other Agere modem driver have provided two strong signals for anyone looking for Windows exploits in the meantime,” Barnett said. “In case you were wondering, there is no need to have a modem connected; the mere presence of the driver is enough to render an asset vulnerable.”

Immersive, Ivanti and Rapid7 all called attention to CVE-2026-21265, which is a critical Security Feature Bypass vulnerability affecting Windows Secure Boot. This security feature is designed to protect against threats like rootkits and bootkits, and it relies on a set of certificates that are set to expire in June 2026 and October 2026. Once these 2011 certificates expire, Windows devices that do not have the new 2023 certificates can no longer receive Secure Boot security fixes.

Barnett cautioned that when updating the bootloader and BIOS, it is essential to prepare fully ahead of time for the specific OS and BIOS combination you’re working with, since incorrect remediation steps can lead to an unbootable system.

“Fifteen years is a very long time indeed in information security, but the clock is running out on the Microsoft root certificates which have been signing essentially everything in the Secure Boot ecosystem since the days of Stuxnet,” Barnett said. “Microsoft issued replacement certificates back in 2023, alongside CVE-2023-24932 which covered relevant Windows patches as well as subsequent steps to remediate the Secure Boot bypass exploited by the BlackLotus bootkit.”

Goettl noted that Mozilla has released updates for Firefox and Firefox ESR resolving a total of 34 vulnerabilities, two of which are suspected to be exploited (CVE-2026-0891 and CVE-2026-0892). Both are resolved in Firefox 147 (MFSA2026-01) and CVE-2026-0891 is resolved in Firefox ESR 140.7 (MFSA2026-03).

“Expect Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge updates this week in addition to a high severity vulnerability in Chrome WebView that was resolved in the January 6 Chrome update (CVE-2026-0628),” Goettl said.

As ever, the SANS Internet Storm Center has a per-patch breakdown by severity and urgency. Windows admins should keep an eye on askwoody.com for any news about patches that don’t quite play nice with everything. If you experience any issues related installing January’s patches, please drop a line in the comments below.



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UK’s Mandelson to resign from House of Lords over Epstein ties | Politics News

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Police are looking into allegations Peter Mandelson may have passed sensitive government information to Jeffrey Epstein.

British politician Peter Mandelson is stepping down from the United Kingdom’s upper house of Parliament amid renewed scrutiny and the prospect of a criminal review into his ties to late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The speaker of the House of Lords, Michael Forsyth, said on Tuesday that Mandelson, 72, had notified the chamber of his intention to resign. Forsyth said the move would come into effect on Wednesday.

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Mandelson, a former UK ambassador to the United States and longtime senior figure in the country’s Labour Party, has come under intense pressure following the release of a new tranche of US government documents related to Epstein.

The material includes emails from Mandelson to Epstein sharing political insights, including market-sensitive information during the 2008 financial crisis that critics say may have broken the law.

British police have said they are assessing reports of possible misconduct “to determine if they meet the criminal threshold for investigation”.

The files also include bank documents suggesting Epstein transferred tens of thousands of dollars to accounts linked to Mandelson or his partner, Reinaldo Avila da Silva. Mandelson has said he does not recall such transactions and will examine the documents.

Additional material includes emails suggesting a friendly relationship between the two men after Epstein’s 2008 convictions for sex offences, as well as an image showing Mandelson in his underwear beside a woman whose face was obscured by US authorities.

Mandelson told the BBC that he “cannot place the location or the woman, and I cannot think what the circumstances were”.

Starmer says he’s ‘appalled’

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Tuesday told his cabinet he was “appalled by the information” regarding Mandelson and was concerned more details would come to light, according to a Downing Street readout of a cabinet meeting.

Starmer also said he has ordered the civil service to conduct an “urgent” review of all of Mandelson’s contacts with Epstein while he was in government.

“The alleged passing on of emails of highly sensitive government business was disgraceful,” the prime minister said, adding he was not yet “reassured that the totality of information had yet emerged” regarding Mandelson’s links with Epstein.

Mandelson, who was sacked from his post as British ambassador to the US in September following earlier revelations about his Epstein ties, quit the Labour Party on Sunday to avoid what he called “further embarrassment”.

In an interview with The Times conducted late last month and published on Tuesday, Mandelson described Epstein as a “master manipulator,” adding: “I’ve had a lot of bad luck, no doubt some of it of my own making.”



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Signs of forced entry at home of missing US TV presenter Savannah Guthrie’s mother after ‘kidnap’ | US News

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Investigators looking into the disappearance of US TV host Savannah Guthrie’s mother have found signs of forced entry at her Arizona home.

Savannah Guthrie is a main co-anchor on Today, the morning show on NBC News, the US sister network of Sky News.

A person familiar with the inquiry told the Associated Press that evidence in the home of Nancy Guthrie, 84, indicated that she had been kidnapped during the night.

They said that several of Nancy Guthrie’s personal items, including her mobile phone, wallet and her car, had been left in her property.

Investigators do not believe at this point that the abduction was part of a robbery, home invasion or kidnapping-for-ransom plot, the person said.

Police officers are currently reviewing information from licence plate cameras and surveillance video from nearby homes while working to analyse data from local phone towers.

Nancy Guthrie was first reported missing by her family after she failed to appear at church on Sunday.

She was last seen at her home near Tucson, Arizona, the night before at around 9.30pm.

In a social media post made on Monday, Savannah Guthrie described her mother as “a woman of deep conviction, a good and faithful servant”.

Neighbours of Nancy Guthrie show support for the family. Pic: AP
Image: Neighbours of Nancy Guthrie show support for the family. Pic: AP

She asked supporters to “raise your prayers with us and believe with us that she will be lifted by them in this very moment. Bring her home”.

Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos urged whoever has Nancy Guthrie to free her because she could die without access to medication.

He said: “If she’s alive right now, her meds are vital. I can’t stress that enough. It’s been better than 24 hours, and the family tells us if she doesn’t have those meds, it can become fatal.”

He added that investigators has taken samples that they hoped would provide at least part of a DNA profile.

Nancy Guthrie. Pic: Pima county sheriff’s department
Image: Nancy Guthrie. Pic: Pima county sheriff’s department

People searching for Nancy Guthrie used drones and search dogs and were supported by volunteers and Border Patrol.

Search crews have now been pulled back, however.

Mr Nanos said: “We don’t see this as a search mission so much as it is a crime scene.”

He previously said that Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance was not “dementia related”.

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“She’s as sharp as a tack,” he said. “The family wants everyone to know that this isn’t someone who just wandered off.”

Savannah Guthrie often brought her mother on Today as a guest.

Speaking on the show in 2022 on Nancy Guthrie’s 80th birthday, she said: “She has met unthinkable challenges in her life with grit, without self-pity, with determination and always, always with unshakeable faith.

“She loves us, her family, fiercely, and her selflessness and sacrifice for us, her steadfastness and her unmovable confidence is the reason any of us grew up to do anything.”



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House sends bill ending government shutdown to Trump’s desk after Dems buck Jeffries in final vote

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The House of Representatives passed a federal funding bill aimed at ending the partial government shutdown on Tuesday, which will bring the four-day standoff to a close shortly after the legislation gets to President Donald Trump’s desk.

The funding bill is a compromise struck between Senate Democrats and the White House that would fund roughly 97% of the federal government through the end of fiscal 2026.

Trump played an integral role in hashing out the new deal and quelling a subsequent rebellion by conservative lawmakers to get it over the finish line.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., signaled he was strongly against the plan, despite his Senate counterpart’s role in putting it together. But several Democrats bucked his concerns in the end to vote in favor of it.

HOUSE CONSERVATIVES THREATEN EXTENDED SHUTDOWN OVER ELECTION INTEGRITY MEASURE

A split image of President Donald Trump and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries

The House of Representatives sent a bill to end the government shutdown to President Donald Trump’s desk after several Democrats bucked House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ warnings the left would not support it. (Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images; Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Democrats had initially walked away from a bipartisan House deal to finish funding the federal government through the end of fiscal 2026 on Sept. 30, rebelling against a bill funding the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) over Trump’s handling of unrest in Minneapolis.

Their mutiny left roughly 78% of the government’s yearly funding hanging in the balance because the DHS bill was lumped into a wider package authorizing budgets for the departments of War, Labor, Health and Human Services (HHS), Transportation, Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and Education.

The deal struck between Senate Democrats and the White House would fully fund those remaining areas while only extending current funding levels for DHS through Feb. 13, in order to give Democrats and Republicans time to hash out a longer-term bipartisan plan.

‘OPENING PANDORA’S BOX’: MIKE JOHNSON BACKS TRUMP AFTER WARNING WHITE HOUSE ABOUT DEAL WITH DEMOCRATS

Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., told reporters on Tuesday that the legislation would succeed, though he hinted at some dissatisfaction with how negotiations played out.

“This is not my preferred route. I wanted to keep all six bills together,” Johnson said. “But listen, the president agreed with Schumer that they would separate Homeland, and we’ll do that, and we’ll handle it. … The Republicans are going to do the responsible thing.”

The Senate’s federal funding deal survived an important hurdle late Tuesday morning, clearing a House-wide “rule vote” to allow for lawmakers to debate the measure and set up a vote on final passage by early afternoon.

House Speaker Mike Johnson on Capitol Hill

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., walks from the chamber to speak with reporters at the Capitol in Washington, Nov. 12, 2025. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo)

SENATE REPUBLICANS PUSH FOR HOUSE GOP REBELLION AGAINST FUNDING PACKAGE, VOTER ID LEGISLATION

It comes after a pair of House conservatives announced they would be backing off their threats to sink the legislation during the rule vote if the legislation was not paired with an unrelated election integrity bill called the SAVE America Act.

Reps. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., and Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., warned they would not support the bill during the rule vote without the SAVE America Act attached but pivoted on Monday night after a conversation with the White House.

“As of right now, with the current agreement that we have, as well as discussions, we will both be a yes on the rule,” Luna said. “There is something called a standing filibuster that would effectively allow Sen. Thune to put voter ID on the floor of the Senate. We are hearing that that is going well, and he is considering that…so we are very happy about that.”

GOVERNMENT SHUTS DOWN AGAIN AFTER DEMOCRATS REVOLT OVER DHS FUNDING

The SAVE America Act would require voter ID at the polls and create a new proof of citizenship mandate in the voter registration process.

But Luna’s insistence that Thune had embraced the standing filibuster, a little-known and antiquated legislative maneuver, appears it was not quite accurate.

Still, Thune said that there were Senate Republicans who “expressed an interest in that, so we’re going to have a conversation about it. But there weren’t any commitments made.”

He noted that forcing the standing filibuster to try and pass the SAVE America Act, or any of its variations coming from the House, would be a massive drain on time in the Senate.

Sen. John Thune

Senate Majority Leader John Thune speaks at a press conference with other members of Senate Republican leadership following a policy luncheon in Washington, Oct. 28, 2025. (Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Doing so “ties up floor time indefinitely,” Thune said. That’s because of rules that guarantee any senator gets up to two speeches on a bill. That, coupled with the clock being reset by amendments to the bill, means that the Senate could effectively be paralyzed for months as Republicans chip away at Democratic opposition.

“There’s always an opportunity cost,” Thune said.

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“Well, at any time there’s an amendment offered, and that amendment is tabled, it resets the clock,” he continued. “The two-speech rule kicks in again. So let’s say, you know, every Democrat enator talks for two hours. That’s 940 hours on the floor.”

It’s not immediately clear when Trump will sign the funding bill, but it’s expected the White House will want to move fast. The longest government shutdown in history, which lasted 43 days, just ended in November.



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Critical React Native Metro dev server bug under attack • The Register

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Baddies are exploiting a critical bug in React Native’s Metro development server to deliver malware to both Windows and Linux machines, and yet the in-the-wild attacks still haven’t received the “broad public acknowledgement” that they should, according to security researchers.

The vulnerability affects the React Native Community command line tool, a very popular npm package with nearly 2.5 million weekly downloads. React Native is a development tool created by Meta that allows users to build mobile applications for iOS and Android using JavaScript and React. 

The flaw, tracked as CVE-2025-11953, arises because the Metro development server started by the React Native Community command line tool exposes an endpoint vulnerable to OS command injection. This allows unauthenticated network attackers to send a POST request to the server and run malicious executables. Similarly, on Windows machines, miscreants can abuse the security hole to execute arbitrary shell commands with fully controlled arguments.

JFrog researchers discovered the vulnerability and disclosed it in early November after Meta issued a fix. The research team assigned it a critical, 9.8 CVSS severity rating, meaning it’s almost as bad as bugs get.

Bug hunters wasted no time publishing proof-of-concept exploits on GitHub, with one such POC being published the same day as the public bug disclosure.

“VulnCheck observed exploitation attempts as early as December, well before public discussion framed CVE-2025-11953 as anything more than a theoretical risk,” VulnCheck CTO Jacob Baines told The Register. “This demonstrates how quickly attackers can act once scanning becomes viable, and why developer tooling – widespread, inconsistently monitored, and often not treated as production-grade – represents a particularly attractive early target.”

In a Tuesday blog, Baines said the bug isn’t receiving the attention it deserves.

“Now, more than a month after initial exploitation in the wild, that activity has yet to see broad public acknowledgment, and EPSS [the Exploit Prediction Scoring System] continues to assign a low exploitation probability of 0.00405. This gap between observed exploitation and wider recognition matters, particularly for vulnerabilities that are easy to exploit and, as internet-wide search data shows, exposed on the public internet,” he wrote.

Baines said the first wave of exploitation began in December, with more attacks delivering the same payloads observed on January 4 and January 21.

These attacks used a multi-stage PowerShell-based loader delivered through cmd.exe, and the code disabled Microsoft Defender protections before retrieving and running the payload: a Rust-based binary with anti-analysis features, including runtime checks to help avoid detection via static inspection.

“The deliberate disabling of Microsoft Defender protections before payload retrieval indicates the attacker anticipated the presence of endpoint security controls and incorporated evasion measures into the initial execution flow,” Baines wrote in a Tuesday blog.

The attacks originated from the following IP addresses: 65.109.182.231, 223.6.249.141, and 134.209.69.155, with the “windows” payload hosted at 8.218.43.248:60124, and 47.86.33.195:60130 hosting both a “windows” and “linux” binary. ®



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The Take: Will the US force regime change in Cuba? | News

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US president wages maximum pressure campaign on Cuba’s already faltering economy.

Cubans are cooking on charcoal and facing worsening power blackouts after the US cut the island off of Venezuelan oil exports. US President Donald Trump promised Cuba will “fail” soon and threatened tariffs on any nations doing business with the island. Can Cuba’s communist government survive the latest US push for regime change?

In this episode:

Episode credits:

This episode was produced by Haleema Shah and Melanie Marich with Phillip Lanos, Spencer Cline, Chloe K. Li, Tuleen Barakat, Maya Hamadeh, and our host, Kevin Hirten. It was edited by Kylene Kiang. 

Our engagement producers are Adam Abou-Gad, Vienna Maglio, and Munera AlDosari. Andrew Greiner is lead of audience engagement.

Our sound designer is Alex Roldan. Our video editors are Hisham Abu Salah and Mohannad al-Melhem. Alexandra Locke is The Take’s executive producer. Ney Alvarez is Al Jazeera’s head of audio. 

Connect with us:

@AJEPodcasts on XInstagramFacebook, and YouTube



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William Stevenson, Jill Biden’s ex-husband, charged with murder after death of wife in Delaware | US News

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The ex-husband of former first lady Jill Biden has been charged with first-degree murder after the death of his wife.

William Stevenson, 77, was indicted on Monday by a grand jury in New Castle County, Delaware, in connection with the death of 64-year-old Linda Stevenson last year.

Mrs Biden married Stevenson in February 1970, when she was 18 years old and a student at the University of Delaware, and he was 23.

They were only married for five years. In March of 1975, she met then Democratic senator for Delaware Joe Biden, and a civil divorce between her and Stevenson was granted in May of that year.

New Castle County Police said Stevenson was taken into custody at the home in Oak Hill without incident on Monday afternoon.

He has since been arraigned and sent to the Howard Young Correction Institution in Wilmington, where he has been unable to pay a $500,000 (£365,207) cash bail.

According to authorities, at around 11.16pm on 28 December, officers responded to a reported domestic dispute at a residence in Oak Hill, just west of Wilmington in New Castle County.

Upon entering the home, emergency services found Mrs Stevenson unresponsive in the living room. She was later pronounced dead at the scene.

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Delaware state police say Mrs Stevenson’s body has been turned over to the Delaware Division of Forensic Science, where a post mortem examination will be conducted to determine the cause and manner of her death.

The office of Jill and ex-president Joe Biden declined to comment to Sky’s US partner network NBC News.



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