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With two days left before Nova Scotians elect their next government, polls suggest Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Houston's decision to call an early vote will pay off and the real battle will be between the Liberals and NDP for second place. The Progressive Conservatives are seeking a second consecutive mandate Tuesday after sweeping the Liberals from power in August 2021. Tory Leader Tim Houston called the snap election on Oct. 27 citing the need for a fresh mandate and ignoring his government's election law, which for the first time in Nova Scotia set a fixed election date -- July 15, 2025. In a recent interview, Alex Marland, a political scientist at Acadia University, said the final result is shaping up to be what Houston hoped for when he called the election. Marland said several factors were at play in Houston's political calculus to go early. "He was ahead in the polls and there was the lack of public attention or excitement or enthusiasm for an election coming against the backdrop of all the attention paid to the U.S. election, and of course there were (Nova Scotia) municipal elections," said Marland. "The fact it was a snap election caught the other parties off guard and made it harder for them to organize." He said the result has been an absence of "interest, anger or motivation" on the part of the electorate. "I think that ultimately benefits the Progressive Conservatives," said Marland. A Narrative Research poll released Wednesday put the Tories comfortably ahead with 44 per cent support. The NDP were second at 28 per cent and the Liberals third with 24 per cent. The survey of 800 adult Nova Scotians between Nov. 4 and 17 is considered accurate within 3.5 percentage points, 95 times out of 100. Tom Urbaniak, of Cape Breton University, said the campaign has been "maybe the quietest I've seen in Nova Scotia." "It just feels less intense on the ground," Urbaniak said. "There are fewer signs and less literature going to doors, and there appears to be less conversation in coffee shops." He said the lack of a longer ramp-up to the fixed date has also contributed to a general lack of attention, and the 30-day campaign is the shortest allowed by law. "So that was also a factor." Issues such as the cost of living, a lack of affordable housing and the province's ailing health-care system were prominent in the campaign, but no single issue dominated in the way the Progressive Conservatives managed to make health care the main issue in 2021. Marland said what the polls suggest is that the Progressive Conservatives should "steamroll" through many rural areas outside of Halifax. "Within the Halifax area they are in much tighter competition with the NDP and that's a real problem for the Liberals because it suggests that the Liberals aren't competitive anywhere," he said. "So the real issue here is how much of the Liberal vote will hold?" Urbaniak said NDP Leader Claudia Chender has emerged as a solid campaigner with strong debate performances that have helped to boost her profile in her first election as leader. With advance polling numbers pointing toward a possible low voter turnout on Tuesday, Urbaniak believes the battle between the Liberals and NDP will hinge on who can get out the most voters in ridings where they are competitive. "It (the result) will favour whoever has strong mobilization on the ground," he said. Liberal Leader Zach Churchill agrees. "We've got to get people out to vote," Churchill said, while pointing out that Elections Nova Scotia have not sent out voter information cards because of the postal strike. "A lot of people do not know where they are voting, so it puts a lot more pressure on candidates, on their volunteers and the central campaign team to inform people," he said Friday. Churchill said he's proud of the campaign his party has run. "You only control what you can control. We put a lot of effort into building the right plan for this province and we are running a campaign that's built around ideas," he said. Chender believes her party's message has been getting through as the result of hard work on the ground. "We've criss-crossed the province in the last 24 hours and we are going to keep visiting as many candidates in communities as we can until election day," she said Friday. She also believes getting out the vote will be critical at a time of year when people are not necessarily focused on politics. "For us as New Democrats, it's one door at a time, giving people that information about where to go vote," she said. Houston, meanwhile, expressed confidence that his campaign has reached enough Nova Scotians to deliver his party a second term in government. "There's work to be done, but on balance I think Nova Scotians recognize the effort," he said Friday. "I'm optimistic for sure, but we'll spend the next few days continuing to work hard and getting around the province." At dissolution, the Progressive Conservatives held 34 seats in the 55-seat legislature and the Liberals held 14 seats, while the NDP had six and there was one Independent. This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 24, 2024. For more Nova Scotia news visit our dedicated provincial page .
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Dyskinetic Cerebral Palsy: A Closer Look at Symptoms, Diagnosis and Clinical Research UnderwayAlabama athletic director Greg Byrne is sending a message to the College Football Playoff selection committee after the Crimson Tide were left out of the field on Sunday. Byrne said he was “disappointed” that the Crimson Tide did not make the 12-team field, particularly because the team had played a difficult schedule in 2024. The athletic director suggested that since their high strength of schedule was not rewarded with a playoff berth, the Crimson Tide might look at playing easier non-conference slates in the future. “We have said that we would need to see how strength of schedule would be evaluated by the CFP,” Byrne wrote on X. “With this outcome, we will need to asses how many (Power 4) non-conference games make sense in the future to put us in the best position to participate in the CFP. That is not good for college football.” Disappointed with the outcome and felt we were one of the 12 best teams in the country. We had an extremely challenging schedule and recognize there were two games in particular that we did not perform as well as we should have. We have said that we would need to see how... — Greg Byrne (@Greg_Byrne) December 8, 2024 Alabama’s most difficult non-conference game in 2024 was at Wisconsin, which looked more prestigious at the start of the year. They beat the Badgers in Madison, but that Wisconsin team wound up going 5-7. Outside of that, the Tide played Western Kentucky, South Florida, and Mercer, none of which are particularly difficult games. Much of Alabama’s strength of schedule came from simply playing its SEC slate. Alabama was left out instead of SMU, an 11-2 team out of the ACC. That Alabama was even in contention despite going 9-3 and not making the SEC Championship suggests their strength of schedule did help them immensely, and that they would not have been considered without it. In fact, it’s safe to argue that had Alabama won even one of the three games they lost, they would have made the field. On the other hand, if a standard SEC schedule is already tough enough to put Alabama in consideration, Byrne is right that there is not much benefit to them playing high-profile non-conference games. That is precisely the scenario Nick Saban warned about earlier Sunday after Alabama was left out. This article first appeared on Larry Brown Sports and was syndicated with permission.
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Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More With 77% of enterprises already victimized by adversarial AI attacks and eCrime actors achieving a record breakout time of just 2 minutes and 7 seconds , the question isn’t if your Security Operations Center (SOC) will be targeted — it’s when. As cloud intrusions soared by 75% in the past year , and two in five enterprises suffered AI-related security breaches , every SOC leader needs to confront a brutal truth: Your defenses must either evolve as fast as the attackers’ tradecraft or risk being overrun by relentless, resourceful adversaries who pivot in seconds to succeed with a breach. Combining generative AI (gen AI), social engineering, interactive intrusion campaigns and an all-out assault on cloud vulnerabilities and identities, attackers are executing a playbook that seeks to capitalize on every SOC weakness they can find. CrowdStrike’s 2024 Global Threat Report finds that nation-state attackers are taking identity-based and social engineering attacks to a new level of intensity. Nation-states have long used machine learning to craft phishing and social engineering campaigns. Now, the focus is on pirating authentication tools and systems including API keys and one-time passwords (OTPs). “What we’re seeing is that the threat actors have really been focused on...taking a legitimate identity. Logging in as a legitimate user. And then laying low, staying under the radar by living off the land by using legitimate tools,” Adam Meyers, senior vice president counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, told VentureBeat during a recent briefing. Cybercrime gangs and nation-state cyberwar teams continue sharpening their tradecraft to launch AI-based attacks aimed at undermining the foundation of identity and access management (IAM) trust. By exploiting fake identities generated through deepfake voice, image and video data, these attacks aim to breach IAM systems and create chaos in a targeted organization. The Gartner figure below shows why SOC teams need to be prepared now for adversarial AI attacks, which most often take the form of fake identity attacks. Source: Gartner 2025 Planning Guide for Identity and Access Management. Published on October 14, 2024. Document ID: G00815708. Scoping the adversarial AI threat landscape going into 2025 “As gen AI continues to evolve, so must the understanding of its implications for cybersecurity ,” Bob Grazioli, CIO and senior vice president of Ivanti , recently told VentureBeat. “Undoubtedly, gen AI equips cybersecurity professionals with powerful tools, but it also provides attackers with advanced capabilities. To counter this, new strategies are needed to prevent malicious AI from becoming a dominant threat. This report helps equip organizations with the insights needed to stay ahead of advanced threats and safeguard their digital assets effectively,” Grazioli said. A recent Gartner survey revealed that 73% of enterprises have hundreds or thousands of AI models deployed, while 41% reported AI-related security incidents. According to HiddenLayer , seven in 10 companies have experienced AI-related breaches, with 60% linked to insider threats and 27% involving external attacks targeting AI infrastructure. Nir Zuk, CTO of Palo Alto Networks , framed it starkly in an interview with VentureBeat earlier this year: Machine learning assumes adversaries are already inside, and this demands real-time responsiveness to stealthy attacks. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University recently published “ Current State of LLM Risks and AI Guardrails ,” a paper that explains the vulnerabilities of large language models (LLMs) in critical applications. It highlights risks such as bias, data poisoning and non-reproducibility. With security leaders and SOC teams increasingly collaborating on new model safety measures, the guidelines advocated by these researchers need to be part of SOC teams’ training and ongoing development. These guidelines include deploying layered protection models that integrate retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and situational awareness tools to counter adversarial exploitation. SOC teams also carry the support burden for new gen AI applications, including the rapidly growing use of agentic AI. Researchers from the University of California, Davis recently published “ Security of AI Agents ,” a study examining the security challenges SOC teams face as AI agents execute real-world tasks. Threats including data integrity breaches and model pollution, where adversarial inputs may compromise the agent’s decisions and actions, are deconstructed and analyzed. To counter these risks, the researchers propose defenses such as having SOC teams initiate and manage sandboxing — limiting the agent’s operational scope — and encrypted workflows that protect sensitive interactions, creating a controlled environment to contain potential exploits. Why SOCs are targets of adversarial AI Dealing with alert fatigue, turnover of key staff, incomplete and inconsistent data on threats, and systems designed to protect perimeters and not identities, SOC teams are at a disadvantage against attackers’ growing AI arsenals. SOC leaders in financial services, insurance and manufacturing tell VentureBeat, under the condition of anonymity, that their companies are under siege, with a high number of high-risk alerts coming in every day. The techniques below focus on ways AI models can be compromised such that, once breached, they provide sensitive data and can be used to pivot to other systems and assets within the enterprise. Attackers’ tactics focus on establishing a foothold that leads to deeper network penetration. Reinforcing SOC defenses through AI model hardening and supply chain security SOC teams need to think holistically about how a seemingly isolated breach of AL/ML models could quickly escalate into an enterprise-wide cyberattack. SOC leaders need to take the initiative and identify which security and risk management frameworks are the most complementary to their company’s business model. Great starting points are the NIST AI Risk Management Framework and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework and Playbook . VentureBeat is seeing that the following steps are delivering results by reinforcing defenses while also enhancing model reliability — two critical steps to securing a company’s infrastructure against adversarial AI attacks: Commit to continually hardening model architectures. Deploy gatekeeper layers to filter out malicious prompts and tie models to verified data sources. Address potential weak points at the pretraining stage so your models withstand even the most advanced adversarial tactics. Never stop strengthing data integrity and provenance: Never assume all data is trustworthy. Validate its origins, quality and integrity through rigorous checks and adversarial input testing. By ensuring only clean, reliable data enters the pipeline, SOCs can do their part to maintain the accuracy and credibility of outputs. Integrate adversarial validation and red-teaming: Don’t wait for attackers to find your blind spots. Continually pressure-test models against known and emerging threats. Use red teams to uncover hidden vulnerabilities, challenge assumptions and drive immediate remediation — ensuring defenses evolve in lockstep with attacker strategies. Enhance threat intelligence integration: SOC leaders need to support devops teams and help keep models in sync with current risks. SOC leaders need to provide devops teams with a steady stream of updated threat intelligence and simulate real-world attacker tactics using red-teaming. Increase and keep enforcing supply chain transparency: Identify and neutralize threats before they take root in codebases or pipelines. Regularly audit repositories, dependencies and CI/CD workflows. Treat every component as a potential risk, and use red-teaming to expose hidden gaps — fostering a secure, transparent supply chain. Employ privacy-preserving techniques and secure collaboration: Leverage techniques like federated learning and homomorphic encryption to let stakeholders contribute without revealing confidential information. This approach broadens AI expertise without increasing exposure. Implement session management, sandboxing, and zero trust starting with microsegmentation: Lock down access and movement across your network by segmenting sessions, isolating risky operations in sandboxed environments and strictly enforcing zero-trust principles. Under zero trust, no user, device or process is inherently trusted without verification. These measures curb lateral movement, containing threats at their point of origin. They safeguard system integrity, availability and confidentiality. In general, they have proven effective in stopping advanced adversarial AI attacks. Conclusion “CISO and CIO alignment will be critical in 2025,” Grazioli told VentureBeat. “Executives need to consolidate resources — budgets, personnel, data and technology — to enhance an organization’s security posture. A lack of data accessibility and visibility undermines AI investments. To address this, data silos between departments such as the CIO and CISO must be eliminated.” “In the coming year, we will need to view AI as an employee rather than a tool,” Grazioli noted. “For instance, prompt engineers must now anticipate the types of questions that would typically be asked of AI, highlighting how ingrained AI has become in everyday business activities. To ensure accuracy, AI will need to be trained and evaluated just like any other employee.” Stay in the know! Get the latest news in your inbox daily By subscribing, you agree to VentureBeat's Terms of Service. Thanks for subscribing. Check out more VB newsletters here . An error occured.SINGAPORE: A domestic helper shared on social media that her employer “forced her” to stay and keep working even though she wanted to quit because of her mental health issues. Posting anonymously in the Facebook group ‘MDW in Singapore’ on Friday (Nov 22), she opened up about feeling overwhelmed and stressed at work. She wrote that “she’s been doing her best at her job,” but the stress of dealing with her employer’s mood swings and the tough work environment has taken a serious toll on her. “I feel really stressed and [find it] difficult to cope with my working environment,” she lamented. “I cannot take the feeling of my stress anymore and can’t eat and sleep well because of this.” When she tried to discuss her decision to terminate her contract, her employer dismissed her concerns and insisted that she stay and continue working. “Is the mental health of the helper not a valid reason to terminate the contract? Cause my employer, I don’t know if she understands or just doesn’t want to understand,” she wrote, asking for advice. “Employers have no right to hold a helper when there is no more peace.” In the comments section, many netizens agreed that her employer cannot ‘force’ her to keep working and that mental health is a valid reason to resign. They encouraged her to talk to her employer about the decision again, clarifying that her well-being was at stake and that she could not continue under such stressful conditions. One netizen said, “Apologies to say, but employers have no right to hold a helper when there is no more peace. If the helper is stressed and depressed because of the workload, and there is no more understanding between them and no more consideration about what’s happening, why should the helper still be there? Helpers have the right to resign, find a better work environment, work peacefully, and work responsibly and with full pride, not by force.” A few others also advised her to contact the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) or worker advocacy groups for guidance on how to proceed legally and protect her rights. One netizen commented, “I believe you did SIP training. If you listened during the training, then you should have an idea of what to do or who to call when employment issues arise. Agency, embassy, CDE, or MOM are some of the help channels you can reach out to.” Another wrote, “Know your rights. An employer can not hold back a helper if the helper doesn’t like to work with the employer anymore. You can consult with your agent and seek their help to midiate between you and your employer. Mental health is a serious matter. Take good care of yourself.” Domestic helpers have the right to resign at any time According to the Ministry of Manpower (MOM), employees, including domestic helpers, have the right to resign at any time as long as they give the required notice or compensate their employer with salary in lieu of notice. Employers cannot refuse to cancel a work pass (such as an EP, S Pass, or Work Permit), and they cannot use this as a means to pressure or punish employees during disputes. If there’s a disagreement, both the employer and employee should try to sort it out calmly, or they can get help through mediation by contacting the employment agency, the Association of Employment Agencies (Singapore), or the Centre for Domestic Employees. If the employer still refuses to cancel the work pass after the helper has resigned and given notice, the worker can contact MOM for help. Read also: Maid says she “doesn’t want to work” but wants to report her employer who “doesn’t want to pay” Featured image by Depositphotos (for illustration purposes only)Ciolacu Leads Romanian Presidential Race Amidst Tight Competition
NEW YORK -- The Alexander brothers -- Alon, Oren and Tal -- have been arrested on federal sex trafficking charges, according to New York prosecutors. For well over a decade, the prominent real estate brothers conspired to "repeatedly and violently drug, sexually assault and rape dozens of women," according to an indictment unsealed Wednesday in New York after the brothers were arrested in Miami on Wednesday. "At times, the Alexander brothers arranged for these sexual assaults well in advance, using the promise of luxury experiences, travel and accommodations to lure and entice women to locations where they were then forcibly raped or sexually assaulted, sometimes by multiple men, including one or more of the Alexander brothers," the indictment said. The allegedly "long-running sex trafficking scheme" began in 2010 and relied on "deception, fraud and coercion," with the brothers flaunting their wealth to induce women to attend parties, events and trips where they were then attacked, prosecutors said. Trips were organized in advance and the brothers allegedly shared photographs of women to make sure they were "sufficiently attractive." The brothers used dating apps or social media to contact them or used party planners as intermediaries, according to the indictment. The Alexanders also procured drugs, including GHB and cocaine, and would sometimes spike women's drinks before assaulting them, the indictment said. The brothers allegedly held down women and "ignored screams and explicit requests to stop." The indictment includes two victims, identified only as Victim 1 and Victim 2, and charges the brothers with conspiracy and forcible sex trafficking. The brothers began their careers at Douglas Elliman, focusing on the real estate market in New York and Miami. They left and launched their own firm, Official, in 2022. They had previously been accused in civil lawsuits of various acts of sexual misconduct.With technical prowess and considerable style, Marta danced around two sliding defenders, outwitted a goalkeeper and calmly scored as another player rushed forward in desperation to stop her. It was more Marta Magic. Javascript is required for you to be able to read premium content. Please enable it in your browser settings.