Power Struggle Deepens at NIH Amidst Leadership Transition
A power struggle within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is intensifying as a new presidential administration prepares to fill approximately 4,000 jobs across the federal government, according to Ars Technica. These political appointments are intended to help carry out the president's agenda and ensure government agencies are responsive to elected officials.
Science agencies like the NIH historically have fewer political appointees compared to other government organizations, according to Ars Technica. The change in administration is creating uncertainty around leadership roles within the NIH.
Enterprises are discovering that retrieval is no longer a feature bolted onto model inference, it has become a foundational system dependency, according to VentureBeat. Failures in retrieval propagate directly into business risk. Stale context, ungoverned access paths and poorly evaluated retrieval pipelines undermine trust, compliance and operational reliability.
Notepad Hacked by State-Sponsored Actors
Notepad was hijacked by state-sponsored hackers, according to Hacker News. Following a security disclosure published in the v8.8.9 announcement, an investigation revealed that the attack involved infrastructure-level compromise that allowed malicious actors to intercept and redirect update traffic destined for notepad-plus-plus.org. The exact technical mechanism remains under investigation, though the compromise occurred at the hosting provider level rather than through vulnerabilities in Notepad code itself. Traffic from certain targeted users was selectively redirected to attacker-controlled servers, according to Hacker News.
Kleiner Perkins Overlooked
In the summer of 2017, Mamoon Hamid joined venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, according to Fortune. "I got calls from friends in the venture business, other GPs general partners, asking: Are you sure this is happening? Is this real?" Hamid recounted. One concerned friend even asked Hamid if he'd already signed anything. Hamid had helped build one of Silicon Valley's buzziest new VC firms, Social Capital, leading a string of wins including investments in Box and Slack.
Recent tremors in the 7.3 trillion Japan government bond market have raised fears that a debt crisis is brewing in the world's fourth largest economy, according to Fortune. Japan's debt is already more than 200% of GDP, and Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's plans for fresh fiscal stimulus are expected to deepen the hole. With snap elections coming up Feb. 8, her opponent is also promising a similar agenda as economic growth remains muted. Investors have started to balk, with JGB yields surging lately amid a string of weak debt auctions over the past year. Last month, bonds tumbled so much that yields spiked about 25 basis points in a single session, prompting Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to call his Japanese counterpart as panic began to spread through global markets, according to Fortune.
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