A day after the Justice Department acknowledged to a federal judge that the full grand jury had not reviewed the final indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney overseeing the case abruptly reversed herself, insisting Thursday that the panel properly approved the charges as she tried to contain the fallout from earlier statements that risked imperiling the prosecution.

The latest statements from Lindsey Halligan, the hastily named interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, represent an attempt to backtrack on earlier comments the prosecution team made under persistent questioning from a judge about the seemingly jumbled process leading to the return of the two-count indictment.

Top Democrats on the House and Senate intelligence committees blasted the Trump administration’s handling of intelligence matters Thursday, alleging that America’s spy agencies have been undermined and politicized under President Donald Trump.

During a floor speech, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia said the Trump administration has rewarded loyalty over competence and purged experienced intelligence officers, including the former head of the National Security Agency. He also noted that deep cuts to intelligence agencies have shuttered efforts to combat foreign disinformation while reducing cyber defenses.

Thousands of Asus routers have been hacked and are under the control of a suspected China-state group that has yet to reveal its intentions for the mass compromise, researchers said.

The hacking spree is either primarily or exclusively targeting seven models of Asus routers, all of which are no longer supported by the manufacturer, meaning they no longer receive security patches, researchers from SecurityScorecard said. So far, it’s unclear what the attackers do after gaining control of the devices. SecurityScorecard has named the operation WrtHug.

A new benchmark from Artificial Analysis reveals alarming weaknesses in the factual reliability of large language models. Out of 40 models tested, only four achieved a positive score – with Google’s Gemini 3 Pro clearly in the lead.

Gemini 3 Pro scored 13 points on the new Omniscience Index, which ranges from -100 to 100, substantially ahead of Claude 4.1 Opus (4.8), GPT-5.1, and Grok 4. The high score mainly reflects the model’s strong accuracy. Gemini 3 Pro outperformed Grok 4, the previously most accurate model, by 14 points. A score of 0 means a model answers questions correctly and incorrectly at the same rate. The AA-Omniscience Benchmark measures how reliably AI models retrieve factual knowledge across different subject areas.

OpenAI is updating its coding environment with GPT-5.1-Codex-Max, a new model designed to handle massive amounts of context and solve complex engineering tasks that take hours to complete.

OpenAI has released GPT-5.1-Codex-Max, its latest ”agentic” coding model. The company says the system is built specifically for ”long-running, detailed work” and replaces the previous GPT-5.1-Codex as the standard across all Codex interfaces.

Af unny thing happened to our political blowhard class on its way to its next appointed bout of savvy prognosticating. As breathless pundits looked to this week’s handful of off-year elections for telltale signs of the country’s mood swings, the news broke that President Donald Trump has reached a new low in his national approval ratings. In a CNN poll released Monday, 63 percent of respondents disapproved of his performance in office, leaving just 37 percent approving. As polling analyst G. Elliot Morris notes, the 26 point net gap in disapproval is the lowest Trump has ever clocked—even in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, when many observers predicted his political demise.