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Low trading volume and a lack of conviction from big-money bettors could leave the bitcoin rally on shaky ground, said 10x Research head Markus Thielen.

The Trump administration has repeatedly insisted that the central goal of the conflict is keeping Iran from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon.

There’s a landgrab underway in the U.S. for perpetual futures, one of the biggest and riskiest parts of crypto — and prediction markets want a piece of it.

Iran’s foreign minister met with Russian President Vladimir Putin Monday as U.S.–Iran negotiations appeared to collapse, raising the risk of further escalation in the Strait of Hormuz — a critical global oil choke point.Abbas Araghchi arrived in Moscow for talks with Putin as diplomatic efforts to end the conflict between Iran and Washington remain stalled.”We see how courageously and heroically the people of Iran are fighting for their independence, for their sovereignty,” Putin said at the meeting in St. Petersburg, according to Russian state news agencies.”The significance of this conversation is hard to overestimate in terms of how the situation around Iran and in the Middle East is developing,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters earlier.RUSSIA, CHINA VETO UN RESOLUTION AIMED AT REOPENING STRAIT OF HORMUZ, HOURS BEFORE TRUMP DEADLINEThe visit comes just days after Araghchi held talks with Pakistani mediators, where he said Iran had shared its position on ending the war but questioned whether the U.S. was “truly serious about diplomacy.”President Donald Trump has pushed back sharply on that characterization, signaling Washington believes it holds the advantage.The meeting comes at a pivotal moment, as tensions at sea intensify and scrutiny grows over Russia’s role following reports Moscow may have shared intelligence with Tehran during the conflict.War Secretary Pete Hegseth warned in March that Russia “should not be involved” in the escalating war, as reports emerged suggesting Moscow may be providing intelligence to Iran on U.S. military positions in the region.U.S. officials say they are closely tracking any potential intelligence-sharing between Russia and Iran, while downplaying the confirmed operational impact. Still, the possibility of Russian support — whether through intelligence, technology transfers or other assistance — has raised concerns that Moscow could indirectly influence the battlefield without committing forces.Araghchi has acknowledged that Russia is assisting Iran “in many different directions,” though he has not publicly detailed the scope of that cooperation.Russia has positioned itself as a potential mediator in the conflict, offering to help restore calm following U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran — actions Moscow has publicly condemned.The Kremlin has also proposed storing Iran’s enriched uranium as part of a potential effort to ease tensions, though the U.S. has not taken up the offer.The outreach comes as ties between Moscow and Tehran have deepened in recent years. Iran last year finalized a 20-year strategic partnership agreement with Russia, which is building two additional nuclear reactors at Iran’s Bushehr facility — the country’s only nuclear power plant.At the same time, Iran has supported Russia’s war effort in Ukraine, supplying Shahed drones that Moscow has used in strikes against Ukrainian targets.The visit also follows diplomatic efforts over the weekend, when Araghchi met with Pakistani mediators and said Iran had shared its position on ending the war but questioned whether the U.S. was “truly serious about diplomacy.”President Donald Trump has pushed back sharply on that characterization, signaling Washington believes it holds the advantage.”If they want to talk, all they have to do is call,” Trump said over the weekend, adding that the U.S. has “all the cards.”Trump has also pointed to what he described as “tremendous infighting and confusion” within Iran’s leadership, arguing Iran is under internal pressure as the conflict drags on.The president canceled a planned trip by special envoy Steve Witkoff and adviser Jared Kushner to Pakistan, where they had been expected to participate in mediated talks with Iranian officials.Trump said the trip would have been a waste of time, arguing there was no reason for U.S. officials to make an 18-hour flight when negotiations could take place remotely.Both sides have since traded blame for the breakdown in talks, with Iran accusing the U.S. of making “excessive demands,” while the Trump administration has insisted Tehran must return to negotiations on U.S. terms.Attempts at mediation, including efforts in Pakistan, have failed to produce progress, with both sides refusing to compromise on core issues such as Iran’s nuclear program and control of the Strait of Hormuz.As diplomacy falters, the confrontation has increasingly shifted to the water.The U.S. has enforced a naval blockade targeting Iranian shipping, while Iran has restricted and at times threatened traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, triggering a high-stakes standoff over one of the world’s most vital energy corridors.Roughly one-fifth of global oil supply passes through the narrow waterway, making disruptions there a direct threat to global markets.TRUMP SEEKS WARSHIPS FROM OTHER COUNTRIES TO HELP SECURE STRAIT OF HORMUZOil prices already have risen as tensions escalate and shipping traffic declines amid uncertainty over whether the strait will remain fully open.Iran has floated a potential off-ramp, proposing to reopen the strait if the U.S. lifts its blockade and agrees to defer nuclear negotiations — a framework the Trump administration has shown little willingness to accept.At the same time, Iran’s outreach to Moscow is drawing renewed scrutiny over Russia’s role in the conflict.Araghchi has acknowledged that Russia is assisting Iran “in many different directions,” though he has not publicly detailed the scope of that cooperation.The meeting with Putin now signals Iran may be seeking to deepen that relationship as leverage — or as an alternative diplomatic channel — as direct talks with Washington falter.With both sides dug in and pressure building at sea, the conflict is increasingly defined by a three-way dynamic: stalled diplomacy, rising military risk in the Strait of Hormuz and the growing question of how far Russia is willing to align itself with Iran.Analysts warn that without a breakthrough, the standoff risks sliding further toward a broader confrontation — with global economic consequences tied directly to the fate of the world’s most important oil transit route.Fox News Digital has reached out to the Iranian mission to the United Nations, the Russian embassy and the White House for comment.

The Virginia Supreme Court heard arguments Monday on a Republican challenge to a congressional redistricting plan approved by voters last week that could help Democrats win as many as four additional U.S. House seats and turn a 6-5 delegate edge to 10-1.”The proposed amendment is invalid for several reasons, any one of which is sufficient to invalidate the proposed amendment and require invalidation of the vote,” Thomas McCarthy, lawyer for the Republican challenge, concluded in the hour-long hearing on Monday.The Republicans contend that the Democrat-led General Assembly violated procedural requirements by placing a constitutional amendment before voters to authorize mid-decade redistricting. If the court agrees that lawmakers broke the rules, it could invalidate the amendment and render last week’s statewide vote meaningless.”It’s often said ours is a government of laws, not of men,” McCarthy continued. “Sadly, that’s not the case if a bare partisan majority can circumvent the constitutional amendment process and undermine the rights of the people in whom all government power ultimately rests – also, that partisan majority can transform our system from a nonpartisan one where the voters elected representatives into a partisan one where the representatives select their voters.”GOP FRACTURES OVER VIRGINIA REDISTRICTING MAP HANDING DEMOCRATS 10-1 EDGE”We ask that the court enforce the constitutional amendment process by affirming the decision below, declaring the proposed amendment invalid and enjoin certification of the election,” he added.Lawyers for Democratic legislative leaders urged the Virginia Supreme Court to uphold the amendment and clear the way for the new map, arguing voters and lawmakers followed every step required by the state Constitution. In rebuttal, attorney Matthew Seligman said, “The people did, in fact, validly ratify the proposed amendment last Tuesday,” and argued challengers were trying to undo a democratic process that had already been completed through legislative approval and a statewide vote.Notably, the justices acknowledged the courts in Virginia only permitted the vote to be held amid the legal challenge.DEMOCRATS’ CHAIR VOWS TO FIGHT ‘TOOTH AND NAIL’ TO STOP TRUMP, REPUBLICANS, IN REDISTRICTING BATTLESeligman also argued to the justices the challengers’ case depended on reading limits into the Constitution that are not actually there. He argued the General Assembly controls its own procedures, that nothing in the Constitution barred lawmakers from acting as they did in special session, and that the legal meaning of “election” supports the state’s position that the amendment was passed before the relevant November election.He closed by saying that federal law and court precedent back the view that Election Day is a single day in November, defeating the challengers’ argument.The Virginia court proceedings mark the latest twist in a national redistricting battle between Republicans and Democrats seeking an advantage in a November election that will determine whether Republicans maintain their narrow majority in the House.The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Alex Phillips,/Image: Video screenshot via Talk
British journalist, broadcaster, and former politician, Alex Phillips,  Talk (formerly TalkTV) shared an emotional response following the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night, warning viewers to stay away from events if Democrats will be present because ‘You might get killed.”
“Because yet again, somebody has attempted to take the life of US President Donald Trump, this time at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.”
“Now, the armed man, believed to be a teacher from Torrance in California and a Democrat supporter, had been staying in the hotel and had somehow managed to smuggle a cache of weapons in with him when he then took it upon himself to storm the dinner. Firing bullets. Thankfully, there have been no casualties. And yet this is the third time that someone’s attempted to take President Trump’s life.”
“In fact, if you were to look at a comparison between assassination attempts and successful assassinations of US presidents and compare those lodged against Republicans and those leveled against the Democrats, you would find a distinct pattern.”
“We’re told, aren’t we, that the right-wing are dangerous, that we’re far-right, that we are warmongers, that we are filled with hate, that we’re divisive, that we need to calm down our rhetoric, that we somehow pose an existential threat to society. And yet the evidence just doesn’t really bear that out, does it?”
“Because yet again Bullets flying through the air at an American event aimed towards somebody on the right wing. Present at that dinner, Erica Kirk, the widow of the assassinated Charlie Kirk. Extremely difficult— extremely, extremely traumatizing event for her.
“And so what do we do about this? Because it seems to me if you are on the right wing and you so much as suggest that immigration should be a bit better controlled, you are treated as if you’re abhorrent, you are ostracized, you’re demonized.”
“On the left, however, you can be as radical as you like. You can use terms such as ‘stamp on the necks of the fascists,’ ‘rid our streets of Nazis,’ and we’ve been through this debate time and again, have we not? Where we turn around and say, ‘Everyone’s got to cool down the rhetoric.’ ‘We’ve all got to mind our words.’”
“No, it’s not ‘we all,’ because from where I’m sitting, there’s only one side of politics that is posing the imminent threat to life. Indeed, on a regular basis, seems to be attacking police officers or shouting terrorist slogans in the street or calling for somebody to be stopped at any cost, using terms such as scum, fascist, Nazi.”
“What are we going to do about this lunatic left wing that seems to have gripped America and indeed gripped the United Kingdom? Does it surprise me that this man responsible for the attempted assassination was a teacher? Well, perhaps in America, much like in the United Kingdom, many of the teachers unions are gripped by radical communism.”
“Does it surprise me he comes from California? Indeed, an entire state at times that looks as though it’s gripped by radical communism. America, and indeed Britain by its side, spent much of the last century fighting radical communism both at home and abroad.”
“We considered those who spread its messages and those who pushed its agenda to be so troubling and so dangerous that we went through decades developing weapons technologies, intense levels of spying and agency work, and intelligence in order to root out those who might share the sentiments of failed communist dictatorships.”
“Fast forward the clock to 2026, and it seems to me, rather than fighting communism, we seem to have it sitting on the green benches of the House of Commons. We have it teaching in schools. We have it infesting our unions. We have it being pushed on social media websites, completely unrestrained, in full belief that they are the ones with superior moral virtue. However twisted, however sick, as Donald Trump might say, these people are, they’re enabled, they’re celebrated, they’re cheered on!
“We need to get real, because what we’re seeing taking place in the United States of America could happen here, especially if we also find ourselves having a change of government.”
“This scourge of left-wing pestilence, the lunacy, the name-calling, the violent rhetoric, the protests, the lies, the fake news, the violence. It’s time we addressed it. It’s gotta stop. It’s got to stop today.”
 
Watch:

WATCH: Alex Phillips’ emotional response after Donald Trump was targeted by a gunman at a Washington dinner@ThatAlexWoman pic.twitter.com/QNy4vvAE56
— Talk (@TalkTV) April 26, 2026

The post British Journalist Alex Phillips’ Emotional Response After WHCD Shooting: ‘Time to Address the Scourge of Left-Wing Pestilence’ appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

AI R&D runs on a cycle of hypothesis, experiment, and analysis — each step demanding substantial manual engineering effort. A new framework from researchers at SII-GAIR aims to close that bottleneck by automating the full optimization loop for training data, model architectures, and learning algorithms.A new framework called ASI-EVOLVE, developed by researchers at the Generative Artificial Intelligence Research Lab (SII-GAIR), aims to solve this bottleneck. Designed as an agentic system for AI-for-AI research, it uses a continuous “learn-design-experiment-analyze” cycle to automate the optimization of the foundational AI stack.In experiments, this self-improvement loop autonomously discovered novel designs that significantly outperformed state-of-the-art human baselines. The system generated novel language model architectures, improved pretraining data pipelines to boost benchmark scores by over 18 points, and designed highly efficient reinforcement learning algorithms. For enterprise teams running repeated optimization cycles on their AI systems, the framework offers a path to reducing manual engineering overhead while matching or exceeding the performance of human-designed baselines.The data and design bottleneckEngineering teams can only explore a tiny fraction of the vast possible design space for AI models at any given time. Executing experimental workflows requires costly manual effort and frequent human intervention. And the insights gained from these expensive cycles are often siloed as individual intuition or experience, making it difficult to systematically preserve and transfer that knowledge to future projects or across different teams. These constraints fundamentally limit the pace and scale of AI innovation.AI has made incredible strides in scientific discovery, ranging from specialized tools like AlphaFold solving discrete biological problems to agentic systems answering basic scientific questions. However, current frameworks still struggle with open-ended AI innovation and are mostly limited to narrow optimization within very specific constraints.Advancing core AI capabilities is far more complex. It requires modifying large interdependent codebases, running compute-heavy experiments that consume tens to hundreds of GPU hours, and analyzing multi-dimensional feedback from training dynamics. “Existing frameworks have not yet demonstrated that AI can operate effectively in this regime in a unified way, nor that it can generate meaningful advances across the three foundational pillars of AI development rather than within a single narrowly scoped setting,” the researchers write.How ASI-EVOLVE learns to researchTo overcome the limitations of manual R&D, ASI-EVOLVE operates on a continuous loop between prior knowledge, hypothesis generation, experimentation, and refinement. The system learns relevant knowledge and historical experience from existing databases, designs a candidate program representing its next hypothesis, runs experiments to obtain evaluation signals, and analyzes outcomes into reusable, human-readable lessons that it feeds back into its knowledge base.There are two key components that drive ASI-EVOLVE. The “Cognition Base” acts as the system’s foundational domain expertise. To speed up the search process, the system is pre-loaded with human knowledge, task-relevant heuristics, and known pitfalls extracted from existing literature. This steers the exploration toward promising directions right from the first iteration. The second component is the “Analyzer,” which tackles the complex, multi-dimensional feedback from the experiments. It processes raw training logs, benchmark results, and efficiency traces, distilling them into compact, actionable insights and causal analyses.Several other complementary modules bring the framework together. A “Researcher” agent reviews prior knowledge from the cognition base and past experimental results to generate new hypotheses, either proposing localized code modifications or writing new programs. The “Engineer” component runs the actual experiments. Because AI training trials are incredibly costly, the Engineer is equipped with efficiency measures like wall-clock limits and early rejection quick tests to filter out flawed candidate programs before they consume excessive GPU hours. Finally, the “Database” serves as the system’s persistent memory, storing the code, research motivations, raw results, and the Analyzer’s final reports for every iteration, ensuring that insights compound systematically over time.By unifying these components, ASI-EVOLVE ensures that an AI agent systematically learns from complex, real-world experimental feedback without requiring constant human intervention. While previous frameworks are designed to evolve candidate solutions, “ASI-EVOLVE evolves cognition itself,” the researchers write. “Accumulated experience and distilled insights are continuously stored and retrieved to inform future exploration, ensuring that the system grows not only in the quality of its solutions but in its capacity to reason about where to search next.”ASI-EVOLVE in actionIn their experiments, the researchers showed that ASI-EVOLVE can successfully improve data curation, model architectures, and learning algorithms to create better AI systems.For real-world enterprise applications, high-quality data is a persistent bottleneck. When tasked with designing category-specific cleaning strategies for massive pretraining corpora, ASI-EVOLVE inspected data samples and diagnosed quality issues like HTML artifacts and formatting inconsistencies. The system autonomously formulated custom curation rules, discovering that systematic cleaning combined with domain-aware preservation rules is far more effective than aggressive filtering. In benchmark tests, 3B-parameter models trained on the AI-curated data saw an average score boost of nearly 4 points over models trained on raw data. The gains were highest in knowledge-intensive tasks, with performance increasing by over 18 points on Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU), an LLM benchmark that covers tasks across STEM, humanities, and social sciences.Beyond data, the system proved highly capable at neural architecture design. Across 1,773 autonomous exploration rounds, it generated 105 novel linear attention architectures that surpassed DeltaNet, a highly efficient human-designed baseline. To achieve these results, ASI-EVOLVE developed multi-scale routing mechanisms that dynamically adjust the model’s computational budget based on the specific content of the input.Finally, in reinforcement learning algorithm design, ASI-EVOLVE discovered novel optimization mechanisms. It designed algorithms that outperformed the competitive GRPO baseline on complex mathematical reasoning benchmarks such as AMC32 and AIME24. One successful variant invented a “Budget-Constrained Dynamic Radius” that keeps model updates within a defined budget, effectively stabilizing training on noisy data.What this means for enterprise AIEnterprise AI workflows constantly require optimizations to existing systems, from fine-tuning open-source models on proprietary data to making small changes to architectures and algorithms. Usually, the computational resources and engineering hours required to carry out such efforts are immense and beyond the capabilities of most organizations. As a result, many are left to run unoptimized versions of standard AI models.The research team says the framework is designed so enterprises can integrate proprietary domain knowledge into the cognition repository and allow the autonomous loop to iterate on internal AI systems.The research team has open-sourced the ASI-EVOLVE code, making the foundational framework available for developers and product builders. 

Melania Trump Pressures ABC Over Kimmel’s ‘Atrocious Behavior’

If Maine governor Janet Mills believes that data centers are harmful to the environment and electricity rates, why is she allowing one to be built?

Apple Fixes Bug That Allowed FBI To Read Deleted Signal Messages

Authored by Brian Quarmby via CoinTelegraph.com,

Tech giant Apple has fixed a security flaw that had allowed the FBI to access a Signal user’s deleted messages through their phone’s push notification database, despite the app being deleted and messages being set to disappear.

In a security advisory released on Wednesday, Apple said it had fixed a bug that allowed “notifications marked for deletion” to be “unexpectedly retained on the device.”

In an X post on Wednesday, Signal said the update fixed the issue that made a user’s messages retrievable by law enforcement.

“Apple’s advisory confirmed that the bugs that allowed this to happen have been fixed in the latest iOS release,” Signal said.

Signal uses end-to-end encryption to secure messages between its users. The bug is a reminder that messaging encryption may not be enough to keep data protected when using certain devices or operating systems.

Apple’s notes on the security patch. Source: Apple

FBI found a backdoor to private messages

This security flaw was first highlighted by independent technology news website 404 Media, which reported on April 9 that documents recently unsealed in Texas federal court related to an FBI case over an attack on the Prairieland ICE Detention Facility last July.

The court proceedings showed that the FBI was able to forensically extract a defendant’s Signal messages from the iPhone’s notification database, which contained cached, readable previews of incoming Signal messages even after disappearing messages were enabled and the app was deleted.

Following the 404 Media report, Signal President Meredith Whittaker called on Apple to quickly fix the issue, noting in an April 14 X post that “notifications for deleted messages shouldn’t remain in any OS notification database.”

Pavel Durov, the co-founder of competing privacy messaging app Telegram, also commented on the report, arguing in an April 14 Telegram post that the only way to truly stay safe was for the app to “force an absence of notification previews” on both ends of a conversation.

Tyler Durden
Mon, 04/27/2026 – 12:05