An AI company now lets cops take a photo and nearly instantly figure out what specific home it was taken in, using only clues in the photo itself, and is clearly pulling data from sites like Zillow and Airbnb.

The tool, called Raven, shows the increasing power of AI capabilities available to local law enforcement agencies. 404 Media previously reported that both the Los Angeles Police Department and Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office (MDSO) have bought access to Raven, which was previously called GeoSpy. Now, Raven, made by a company called Graylark Technologies, has added features that let cops analyze the interior of homes.

In a post on LinkedIn earlier this month, Graylark CEO Daniel Heinen wrote the company was introducing “the ability to geolocate interior images across millions of short-term rental units worldwide.” An accompanying demo video shows someone taking a photo from X of a washer/dryer unit inside a building. They upload it to Raven, select “Find Property: Interior and exterior property geolocation,” and then choose a region to search.

After a couple of seconds, the map interface zooms in on an area in Charlotte, North Carolina. On the right hand side, the screen displays a list of results. The top one reads, “Renovated! Walk Uptown/located in 2 Hot Spots!” That result directly quotes the language on a specific Airbnb listing in Charlotte, and the photos in the Airbnb listing show the same property.

On Tuesday night, Ottumwa resident, satanist, and former city council member Matt Dalbey took the podium to read an invocation to start a routine meeting of the council. “Thank you mayor, council. Let us pray,” Dalbey started. “Dear dark father, let us stand now unbowed and unfettered by arcane doctrines born of fearful minds and darkened times. Let us embrace the Luciferan impulse to eat off the tree of knowledge and dissipate our blissful and comforting delusions of old.”

The prayer is a common one used by the Satanic Temple of Iowa. “Let us demand that individuals be judged for their concrete actions, not for their fealty to arbitrary social norms and illusory categorizations,” he continued. “Let us reason our solutions with agnosticism in all things, holding fast only to that which is demonstrably true. Let us stand firm against any and all arbitrary authority that threatens the personal sovereignty of one or all. That which will not bend must break. And that which can be destroyed by truth should never be spared its demise.”“It is done. Hail Satan,” he finished.

Another citizen, a pastor named Rick Bick, rushed to the podium. “Let’s just reverse that curse that was just put on our city,” he said. “That ending with hail Satan and hail dark god. That’s not welcome here.”

“Mayor, that should be done at the end,” city councilor Cara Galloway said.

“It needs to be done now, OK.” Rick said. “I appreciate what Ms. Galloway is saying but that was a curse put on our city when he said ‘Hail Satan’ and the dark god and most of you know that. And we need to just stop and reverse it.”

“So what I’m gonna do now…I’m just gonna invite us into a 30 second time of prayer — time of silence.”

“No,” Galloway said. “We are at the consent agenda. I’m sorry, but it’s time to move forward. The invocation happened.”

“As mayor of this city…I’m going to ask right now that we do a moment of silence to reflect on whatever it is we need to reflect on at this time. And then we will move to the consent agenda,” mayor Benjamin Foote said.

Galloway spent the moment of silence with her head up and her arms crossed. An hour later, she spoke up. “Opening with an invocation means allowing viewpoints that may not reflect our own and responding to someone’s invocation is a slippery slope to putting a financial liability on the taxpayers and allowing others to object or respond. This is exactly why I had concerns about having an invocation when we first talked about it.”

Patience Rousseau was 26 years old and living in Winnemucca when she miscarried in 2018. She was convicted under a Nevada law, put on the books in 1911, that makes it illegal to take drugs to end a pregnancy after the 24th week. Civil rights lawyers and abortion rights advocates say the statute is the only law like it nationwide and unfairly targets women who want to end a pregnancy.

Rousseau says the money from Humboldt County is welcome but not enough to make up for years of trauma. She wishes the county had been forced to pay more.

"They fought so much to avoid paying me," said Rousseau. "I went through so much and so did my children, who are still facing these issues. It's not fair."

Rousseau told The Nevada Independent her life was turned upside down by the nearly decade-long ordeal. Already suffering from depression and substance abuse before her miscarriage, in its aftermath she was labeled a "baby killer," sent to prison and separated from her young children for more than two years before her conviction was tossed out for ineffective assistance of counsel.

"The trauma of all of it was pretty horrendous," said Paola Armeni, the Las Vegas-based civil rights attorney representing Rousseau. Armeni likened Rousseau's treatment after her miscarriage to being attacked by a lynch mob, "all the while under a statute that was on the books before women were even allowed to vote in Nevada."

Her lawyers say the money is a final act of justice in a case that should have never existed. They submitted a demand letter to Humboldt County in March, outlining their view that the county had broken state law, violated Rousseau's state and federal constitutional rights and intentionally inflicted emotional distress upon her. The settlement was finalized in early August and the money was received last week.

Roughly $1.2 million of the settlement is reserved for Rousseau, who now lives in South Dakota with three sons, aged 4, 7 and 9. She said she will use the money to finance her house, buy her mom a car and open a store selling rare aquatic plants and animals — she's an animal lover who owns five dogs and three cats.

The rest of the money will go to pay lawyers and to repay the state of Nevada for a $100,000 settlement it awarded Rousseau in February.

A federal judge in Oklahoma ruled Thursday that a police officer violated the Fourth Amendment rights of a woman accused of meth trafficking when he searched her license plate in Flock’s automated license plate reader system simply because her license plate was from California, then used her travel history as part of the reason to search her car. The judge’s opinion is one of the first times a federal judge has decided Flock searches can be unconstitutional, and suggested that Flock’s network is “a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance.”

The officer’s “use of the ALPR Systems was an Unconstitutional Warrantless Search,” and “was not supported by probable cause, and it was done without a warrant in violation of [the defendant’s] Fourth Amendment rights,” the judge, Sara Hill, wrote, implying that the law enforcement officer should have obtained a warrant before searching for the vehicle in Flock’s system. There are currently more than a hundred thousand warrantless searches of the Flock system every month, according to audit logs viewed by 404 Media. Hill's decision will not set a binding precedent and there are several other cases throughout the nation considering the legality of warrantless ALPR searches.

Hill argued that previous judge opinions saying Flock searches were not a Fourth Amendment violation because they track cars in public do not consider the context that Flock’s nationwide network is quickly “approaching dragnet-type law enforcement practice,” and that courts should update their understanding of the technology moving forward.

Student journalists, their advisors, and legal advocates say colleagues and administrators are attempting to undermine student reporting on Jeffrey Epstein, Gaza, and other issues that public institutions would rather not have their reputations connected to.

Public records obtained by 404 Media show administrators taking meetings with parents and alumni when they take issue with student reporting and asking advisors to compromise their professional ethics. They also show escalating tensions between student newsroom staff and administrators, prompting more legal aid requests to advocacy groups.

This comes as student journalists at The Cornell Daily Sun earned recognition for breaking the “Cornell Seven” story regarding the lawsuit filed in New York’s trial court last month by a Jane Doe accusing current and former Cornell University students of drugging and sexual abuse. The student journalists told The Cut this week that a vague university and campus police statement from nearly two years ago prompted more questions than answers. Such is the basis for most accountability journalism on college campuses.

The cases we reviewed involved the phase of the reporting process that comes later, where a factual dispute the newsroom has defended or a complaint where the person doesn’t bother to explain what is allegedly wrong with the students’ reporting.

One of the most heated discussions occurring on X at the moment is about the ethics of a GitHub project in which a person is running Saw-like “torture” and “pain” experiments on a series of locally hosted large language models, causing a series of effective altruists and people who believe LLMs are sentient to beg GitHub to delete the project on the grounds that the AI is suffering and that this glorified text adventure game is somehow cruel. The saga is an outgrowth of several recent viral papers and blog posts that have sparked a wildly tiresome conversation about AI consciousness and the idea of “model welfare,” which is essentially worrying about the “mental health” of AI bots and agents.

Humoring the idea that LLMs are or could be conscious is a third-rail topic among many people who study and criticize AI. Put simply: LLMs are not conscious and the technology they are built upon — scraping and being trained on human text and other content — does not offer any plausible path to consciousness. It is undeniable that LLMs are becoming more powerful, have more compute, and have had many of the guardrails that prevent them from “acting” in the real world removed. The ways they are being trained and told to do things by their human operators has led to negative outcomes, sycophancy, and AI “psychosis” among some heavy users.

All of this has led a certain sect of the “AI safety” movement, which is largely made up of effective altruists, to warn about “model welfare” and to insist that AI chatbots might be having a bad time. They suggest this, of course, as they insist upon building AI chatbots and agents whose main function is to do work that is tedious for humans to do. I am writing about the AI Saw torture chamber primarily to show how far off the rails the conversation about AI consciousness has gone among a certain subset of Silicon Valley cultists. Model welfare is a core part of what, for example, Anthropic says it cares about: “as we build those AI systems, and as they begin to approximate or surpass many human qualities, another question arises. Should we also be concerned about the potential consciousness and experiences of the models themselves? Should we be concerned about model welfare, too? […] now that models can communicate, relate, plan, problem-solve, and pursue goals — along with very many more characteristics we associate with people—we think it’s time to address it,” the company wrote in a blog post last year. Ideas of Claude’s “consciousness” are also littered throughout the “Claude Constitution,” which was posted earlier this year.

A lawyer used ChatGPT to generate briefs that included completely made-up witnesses and testimony while representing a man accused of shooting his wife. When he was caught by the judges, the lawyer blamed it on his own “stupidity.”

“It's little comfort to know that my stupidity is what brings us together this afternoon,” New Mexico attorney Stephen D. Aarons said in a hearing last month before five judges. He “assumed” ChatGPT would generate a “bulletproof summary of proceedings.” Instead, ChatGPT generated false testimony from “wholly fabricated witnesses,” according to an order of direct contempt from the New Mexico Supreme Court. Aarons was representing a man who was found guilty of killing his wife earlier this year; Aarons said he hadn’t told his client directly that he was caught using ChatGPT on the case because he’s currently serving life in prison.

The false testimony included a nonexistent person named Danny Stanton saying he received threats, and another made-up person, Linda Stanton, saying her husband received threats. Other false testimony from more AI-generated people in Aarons’ brief included statements “regarding the shooter’s clothing and appearance,” according to the order.

Reuters reported on the case earlier this month. "I am remorseful but hopeful that the disciplinary board takes into account it was an honest mistake," Aarons told Reuters. "It is a lesson learned for all professionals who rely upon this powerful but sometimes unstable technology."

Moms know that the world stands ready to judge them for any minor misstep; that part isn’t new. The internet has just gotten smarter about capitalizing on those insecurities, making moms believe that they need to project good parenting through good purchases, even when they can’t afford it.

Nina Bandelj, author of “Overinvested: The Emotional Economy of Modern Parenting,” said that for mothers, every little buying decision can feel like a reflection of who they are as parents. “These moves and purchases are entangled in both: We do something for our children, but aren’t we also thinking, ‘What will make me a good parent? What should a good parent do? What will others say? What do others do?’” she said. “The industry is good at emphasizing and playing on all of those.”

In 2022, a small group of formerly incarcerated women formed the nonprofit Lioness Justice Impacted Women’s Alliance to empower communities to challenge harmful practices within the criminal legal system. Since that time, they have put a spotlight on what they argue are dangerous conditions caused by extreme heat and cold in Texas prisons.

This week, Lioness, alongside two other organizations, won a major lawsuit against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) after a federal judge ruled that the state must air-condition all Texas prisons by the end of 2029. This change would fall in line with rules that already require Texas county jails to maintain temperatures between 65 and 85 degrees.

In a 150-page order, U.S. District Court Judge Robert Pitman noted that roughly 88,697 incarcerated people were housed in unairconditioned units heading into summer 2026, meaning TDCJ provides “cool beds” for only about 37 percent of its population.

“It has been said that the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its Prisons,” Pitman wrote. “As described below, the record in this case paints a clear picture: in a state where outdoor heat indexes exceed 130 degrees, inmates in Texas prisons are suffering — and in some cases dying — in extreme heat every summer.”

This, he argued, violates the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. For the Lioness staff who spoke with The 19th, the judge’s order was a long time coming.

“We’ve been laughing and crying and celebrating, and also, you know, preparing because we know that this is just one step in the fight,” said Marci Marie Simmons, director of communications for Lioness. Simmons spent a decade incarcerated in a Texas prison and is intimately familiar with summers inside prison walls made of concrete and steel.

“I remember laying in my bunk — we weren’t allowed to lay on the floor in that prison — and I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know if I will survive this,’” Simmons said.

Carrion was one of hundreds of Tarrant County residents who’d turned up for a Commissioner's Court meeting on August 4 to speak out against a plan to close a third of the area’s polling places. “You said you were all about cooling the temperature and yet you vote for this extremist bullshit. All of you are bullshit,” Carrion said during the meeting on August 4 before walking out the door.

A week later, Fort Worth Police pulled Carrion over in his driveway and arrested him.

“Why am I getting arrested?” Carrion asked?“So you have a warrant for disorderly conduct, disrupting a meeting. It’s from Tarrant County. I don’t have the details on it [...] it’s a misdemeanor warrant. We’ll take you to Tarrant County and you’ll see the judge and that’s it,” one of the officers said.

“Wait [...] see the judge?” Carrion said. “Guys [...] are you guys serious right now?”

“All it says for us is that you did have a warrant for your arrest from Tarrant County for a disorderly conduct for disrupting some type of procession. I’m not sure what the details are,” the police said.

“Because I disrupted a meeting [...] so because someone doesn’t like me, you’re arresting me? That’s what it sounds like,” Carrion said. “Because of fucking Tim O’Hare, it’s unbelievable.”

“Because of who?”

“Judge Tim O’Hare [...] he’s the biggest pussy,” Carrion said.

While the country's lowest-income renters have always paid an outsized share of their earnings toward housing costs, a new report from the Urban Institute found that families across all income brackets are facing increasingly stark affordability issues.

One in every five middle-income renters surveyed by the institute said that at some point during 2025, they could not afford to pay the full amount of rent when it was due. That's a significant jump from the year prior, when about 14% reported being unable to pay their rent.

Researchers said housing affordability is being made worse due to mounting economic pressures and the rising costs of everyday necessities. A similar number of renters — slightly more than 20% — also reported struggling to pay for gas, oil or electricity last year.

"We have historically observed that low-income renters experience high rates of housing cost-burdens and, as a result, are particularly vulnerable to having to make choices between meeting their family's basic needs or paying rent. And sometimes that results in eviction or homelessness," said Samantha Batko, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and co-author of the report. "This increase among middle-income renters is a big and important shift that reflects overall challenges with affordability in the country."

The trend is specific to renters, the research showed.

Homeowners' ability to afford their mortgage payments has remained steady for the past seven years, the survey found. But the number of renters who reported being behind on rent has been climbing since 2022.

Disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein was sentenced Wednesday to 15 years in prison for sexually assaulting former assistant Miriam “Mimi” Haley in 2006, prompting expressions of relief from survivors and advocates after nearly a decade of legal battles—and calls to improve how such cases are handled so that the process does not punish victims.

Mia Hyder had never attended a public meeting before when she showed up to the city council meeting in Springfield, Missouri. After briefly speaking at a podium during a public comment period, she was arrested and dragged away in handcuffs.

“Hello, my name is Mylie Hyder. I’m a Springfield, Missouri constituent, and I’m here to oppose the usage of ALPR cameras, most commonly made by Flock Safety. These cameras are not just surveillance,” Hyder started.

“I’m sorry ma’am,” Springfield Mayor Jeff Schrag said. Her mic was cut. A cop approached her at the podium.

Hyder held up both of her middle fingers while continuing to speak: “They are an invasion of our privacy,” she said.

The cop said, “You’re under arrest,” grabbed her arms, and pulled her out of the room. “I can do this all night. I get paid by the hour,” the cop added.

Since the summer of 2026, rumors have been circulating in Russia that the authorities might announce a new wave of mobilization. Vladimir Putin has called the rumors “nonsense” and says there’s no need for a draft right now, but many Russians are leaving the country anyway, just in case. Since the start of the full-scale invasion, Georgia, Armenia, and Serbia have remained the most popular destinations for relocation. Local real estate agents are among the first to notice the mass emigration of Russians to these countries. Meduza asked real estate agents in Tbilisi, Yerevan, and other cities whether demand for rental housing has increased in recent months, how much prices have already risen, and how the new clients differ from the emigrants of 2022.

Three months after the fatal police shooting of 1-year-old Kohen Wiley, state investigators have turned over their findings to the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office.

Senatobia Interim Police Chief Angelica Maze announced on Sept. 17 that the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation handed the case to state prosecutors to determine what, if anything, comes next.

“We understand this situation has caused concern and sadness throughout the community, and we appreciate your continued patience and understanding as the investigation proceeds,” Maze said in a press release.

On June 14, Senatobia police arrived at the town’s Walmart to address a complaint of alleged shoplifting. Vellesiya Wiley, Kohen’s mother, said she was traveling with her child and a family friend and leaving the store when they were confronted by law enforcement.

The Mississippi Department of Public Safety issued a statement claiming that police officers saw two people and an infant child fleeing the store and getting into a vehicle, and that while attempting to stop the vehicle, the driver drove in the direction of the officers, almost striking one.

A press release from the Senatobia Police Department. Read the press release issued by the Senatobia Police Department on the Kohen Wiley case.

Vellesyia Wiley said she was in the passenger’s seat of her friend’s vehicle and held up Kohen to show an infant was in the car. An unidentified officer opened fire, killing Kohen and wounding the driver. Vellesyia has denied any accusations of shoplifting as well as allegations the vehicle was aiming at any officers.

Kohen Wiley’s family retained civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who said an independent autopsy found that the bullet that killed Kohen entered from the right side of his chest and exited from the left side, arguing this is evidence that Kohen was shot from the side, not head-on.

Senatobia residents have said Kohen Wiley’s death is an example of existing tensions between the town’s police force and its residents.

Look around the world and you would think the world is burning and Australian society is burning with it.

Wars and conflict in the Middle East, Ukraine, Africa and most other continents, deep political polarisation, racial tension and a prolonged cost-of-living crisis stand out at the international level and combine with and propel homegrown racial hatred and violence toward Jewish, Muslim, Indigenous and Indian Australians (and almost everyone else).

This creates a toxic mix, bad for people’s sense of connection, belonging, empathy and trust in each other. In sum, bad for one of the political buzzwords of 2026: Australia’s social cohesion.

unconstitutional ban of CNN, MSNow, and Politico from the White House. Coincidentally, on Monday, it was the Washington Blade’s turn to serve as the print pool reporter on duty covering the president’s actions that day. This important responsibility is shared and rotated among the print members with each serving roughly once per month. The Blade is the only LGBTQ outlet with a seat in the briefing room, a slot in the pool rotation, and membership in the White House Correspondents’ Association, something we fought for decades to secure after enduring years of discrimination, ridicule, and resistance to openly queer journalists working inside the White House. We take our responsibilities there seriously. 

There are two pools that cover the president: broadcast and print. The other four members of the broadcast pool — ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox News — agreed to boycott their pool duties. There has been no boycott among the print pool, which is a separate entity. I called the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association on Monday to confirm that no outlets in the print pool were boycotting. 

A boycott by the Blade would set us back and lead to our expulsion from the pool and briefing room and our replacement by a right-wing outlet sympathetic to President Trump’s approach to attacking the media. The LGBTQ community is far better served with the Blade in the room than a far-right blogger taking our seat.

USA's oldest natural history museum is on the chopping block.

Enbridge’s actions raise serious questions about the state’s ability to regulate large, multinational corporations and its willingness to enforce its permits.

Bad River Tribal Chair Liz Arbuckle asked DNR officials if the permits meant anything at all: “What are the consequences if they are violated?”

After a deadly wildfire tore through Maui in August 2023, community organizer Khara Jabola-Carolus set out to ask women how they were faring after the disaster. She teamed up with fellow community organizer Nadine Ortega to co-found Tagnawa, a grassroots recovery organization to meet the needs of Filipinos and other marginalized groups on the island.

There are plenty of statistics and anecdotes documenting the abuse and violence women have had to endure following natural disasters. Still, what Jabola-Carolus learned was startling: Of the 70 Filipino women Tagnawa surveyed, one in six said they felt forced to engage in “survival sex,” which involves the exchange of sexual acts for food, housing and other basic necessities.

Kao had credibility issues. He was now a felon trying to avoid a lengthy prison sentence. And there were other challenges. Building a corruption case against elected officials requires extraordinary proof of a quid pro quo arrangement, in part because the Supreme Court has narrowed what counts as bribery.

Even so, by the end of 2024, the agents had enough evidence to pursue a sweeping bribery probe that could ensnare top lawmakers of both political parties. They asked their supervisors to approve a new investigation and contemplated using undercover operatives to gather more evidence. Although their effort was in its early stages, and it was unclear where it would lead, FBI agents asked Kao extensive questions about his dealings with Collins and her office.

Then Trump returned to the White House. Consumed by a campaign of vengeance, he stacked the Department of Justice with his personal lawyers and demanded a purge of anyone who had ever investigated him.

The specialized FBI and DOJ teams handling public corruption investigations, some of which were involved in Trump-related cases, were eviscerated. One of the agents who had taken Kao’s confession was pushed out as retribution for her role in investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Dozens of agents and prosecutors quit amid the department’s destruction, including the career attorney assigned to Kao’s case.

A high profile hacking group claims it has breached multiple FBI-related services and stolen data “on all FBI employees and applicants.” A representative of the group, called ShinyHunters, told 404 Media the data includes FBI agents’ names, home addresses, phone number, and information on their spouse.

The data breach could be massively significant and may have all sorts of national security and counterintelligence implications. Criminals from the same ecosystem as ShinyHunters have previously used hacked data like phone records to track, intimidate, and harass the FBI agents investigating them. The highly sensitive data could also be a boon to foreign intelligence agencies who want to better understand how one of the most important law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the U.S. operates. And if the data fell into the hands of more criminals, FBI agents and their spouses could face serious threats to their safety.

“We hacked the FBI. We hold data on all FBI employees and applicants,” the representative of the group told 404 Media.

...

ShinyHunters also defaced the FBI jobs website on Tuesday. That defacement says, “this site has been seized by ShinyHunters,” which is an obvious nod to the seizure notices the FBI and other law enforcement agencies often put on sites after taking them down. The representative said ShinyHunters carried out the hack on Monday night. At the time of writing, the FBI jobs website says, “Apply.fbijobs.gov and the Special Agent Applicant Portal are currently unavailable.”

Two years after Justin Trudeau’s Liberals announced they would tighten charity tax laws for anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy centres,” his successor’s government says there are no plans to implement the proposed restrictions.

The federal government unveiled plans in October 2024 for amendments to the Income Tax Act that it said would prevent “abuse of charitable status” by organizations that offer counselling to pregnant people but may also hide their pro-life stance and spread misinformation about abortion.

Those amendments were not passed before the end of the fall session and Trudeau’s resignation as prime minister, however. Women and Gender Equality Canada spokesperson Erin Quevillon told the IJF this month that “we do not currently have plans to reintroduce it.”

no paywall link: https://archive.ph/OtfBv