White House officials tricked by email prankster

A self-described "email prankster" in the UK fooled a number of White House officials into thinking he was other officials, including an episode where he convinced the White House official tasked with cyber security that he was Jared Kushner and received that official's private email address unsolicited.

"Tom, we are arranging a bit of a soirée towards the end of August," the fake Jared Kushner on an Outlook account wrote to the official White House email account of Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert. "It would be great if you could make it, I promise food of at least comparible (sic) quality to that which we ate in Iraq. Should be a great evening."

Bossert wrote back: "Thanks, Jared. With a promise like that, I can't refuse. Also, if you ever need it, my personal email is" (redacted).

Bossert did not respond to CNN's request for comment; the email prankster said he was surprised Bossert responded given his expertise. The emails were shared with CNN by the email prankster.

White House officials acknowledged the incidents and said they were taking the matter seriously. "We take all cyber related issues very seriously and are looking into these incidents further," White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told CNN.

Cyber experts consulted by CNN say the incidents are illustrative of how vulnerable Americans -- even those in the highest reaches of power -- remain to the potential threat of spear-phishing, the process through which officials are duped by hackers, and expose government computers and systems to various cyber threats. No one in any of these situations clicked any links making them vulnerable, and the prankster appears motivated by mischief not anything more malignant, so the severity of these White House pranks should not be overstated. But spear-phishers often begin the process by falsely posing as a friend or associate before asking the victim to take further action.

"This shows how susceptible government officials are to spear-phishing in general," Adam Malone, a former cyber specialist and special agent for the FBI, told CNN. "Spear-phishing is the most common technique used by hackers to gain access to their victims. This information shines a light on how easy it is for people to build trust with unverified individuals."

Former Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta infamously fell victim to such a trap, though the person who preyed on him had more nefarious intentions than mockery.

"I try and keep it on the humorous side of things," the email prankster told CNN. "I'm not trying to get the keys to the vault or anything like that."

One such exchange appears to have possibly played a role in the tensions between then- White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci, who resigned from his job earlier today, and since-fired White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus.

Masquerading as Priebus, the prankster emailed Scaramucci's official account using a mail.com account on Saturday, the day after Priebus' resignation was announced.

"I had promised myself I would leave my hands mud free," wrote the fake Priebus, "but after reading your tweet today which stated how; 'soon we will learn who in the media who has class, and who hasn't', has pushed me to this. That tweet was breathtakingly hypocritical, even for you. At no stage have you acted in a way that's even remotely classy, yet you believe that's the standard by which everyone should behave towards you? General Kelly will do a fine job. I'll even admit he will do a better job than me. But the way in which that transition has come about has been diabolical. And hurtful. I don't expect a reply."

The very real Scaramucci responded: "You know what you did. We all do. Even today. But rest assured we were prepared. A Man would apologize."

Fake Priebus wrote back: "I can't believe you are questioning my ethics! The so called 'Mooch', who can't even manage his first week in the White House without leaving upset in his wake. I have nothing to apologize for."

Actual Scaramucci responded: "Read Shakespeare. Particularly Othello. You are right there. My family is fine by the way and will thrive. I know what you did. No more replies from me."

In another exchange, Scaramucci was hoodwinked by the same prankster pretending to be Ambassador to Russia-designate Jon Huntsman Jr.

"Who's (sic) head should roll first?" the bogus Huntsman asked from a Gmail account on Friday, before the Priebus termination had been announced. "Maybe I can help things along somewhat."

"Both of them," responded the real Scaramucci, in an apparent reference to both Priebus and White House Senior Adviser Steve Bannon, about whom Scaramucci has been quite critical.

After a few other nice messages of support from faux Huntsman, Scaramucci wrote, "Are you in Moscow now? If not please visit."

Huntsman himself was also tricked, with the prankster pretending to be Eric Trump, the President's son. "Thanks for the thoughtful note," the ambassador-designate wrote to fake Eric Trump. "Russia will be a challenging but no doubt rewarding assignment." The fake Eric Trump responded with this suggestion: "Maybe we could have Dad sat (sic) on a horse, top off, giving the full Putin! He's in better shape than his suits suggest."

Eric Trump, too, was similarly hoodwinked by the prankster emailing as his older brother, Donald Trump Jr., but he soon caught on and responded, "I have sent this to law enforcement who will handle from here." Neither Huntsman nor Trump would comment on the record. The email prankster told CNN he never heard from anyone in law enforcement about his email to Eric Trump.

The email prankster tweets under the name @SINON_REBORN, where he posts his pranks, and describes himself as a "lazy anarchist." In June, he hoodwinked Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs and Michael Corbat of Citigroup, and he did the same to Barclays CEO Jes Staley in May. Staley, thinking he was being emailed by Barclays chairman John McFarlane, praised the man he thought was his colleague in effusive detail, saying among other things that he had "all the fearlessness of Clapton." The prankster said Staley was the most surprising of the responses, because it was the first one and because "he responded in such gushing detail."

Court keeps Great Lakes wolves on endangered species list

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. — A federal appeals court is keeping gray wolves in the western Great Lakes region on the endangered species list.

A panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday upheld a district judge's 2014 ruling that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had acted prematurely by removing federal protections from wolves in Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Wolves had nearly disappeared from the region when they were designated as endangered in the 1970s. They now total about 3,800.

Federal and state regulators say they've recovered and should be returned to state management, which could include allowing wolf hunting.

Environmental groups say they're still vulnerable.

The appeals panel said the government hadn't reasonably considered factors including loss of the wolf's historical range.

The 'creepy Facebook AI' story that captivated the media

The newspapers have a scoop today - it seems that artificial intelligence (AI) could be out to get us.

"'Robot intelligence is dangerous': Expert's warning after Facebook AI 'develop their own language'", says the Mirror.

Similar stories have appeared in the Sun, the Independent, the Telegraph and in other online publications.

It sounds like something from a science fiction film - the Sun even included a few pictures of scary-looking androids.

So, is it time to panic and start preparing for apocalypse at the hands of machines?

Probably not. While some great minds - including Stephen Hawking - are concerned that one day AI could threaten humanity, the Facebook story is nothing to be worried about.

Where did the story come from?

Way back in June, Facebook published a blog post about interesting researchon chatbot programs - which have short, text-based conversations with humans or other bots. The story was covered by New Scientist and others at the time.

Facebook had been experimenting with bots that negotiated with each other over the ownership of virtual items.

It was an effort to understand how linguistics played a role in the way such discussions played out for negotiating parties, and crucially the bots were programmed to experiment with language in order to see how that affected their dominance in the discussion.

A few days later, some coverage picked up on the fact that in a few cases the exchanges had become - at first glance - nonsensical:

Although some reports insinuate that the bots had at this point invented a new language in order to elude their human masters, a better explanation is that the neural networks had simply modified human language for the purposes of more efficient interaction.

As technology news site Gizmodo said: "In their attempts to learn from each other, the bots thus began chatting back and forth in a derived shorthand - but while it might look creepy, that's all it was."

AIs that rework English as we know it in order to better compute a task are not new.

Google reported that its translation software had done this during development. "The network must be encoding something about the semantics of the sentence" Google said in a blog.

And earlier this year, Wired reported on a researcher at OpenAI who is working on a system in which AIs invent their own language, improving their ability to process information quickly and therefore tackle difficult problems more effectively.

The story seems to have had a second wind in recent days, perhaps because of a verbal scrap over the potential dangers of AI between Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and technology entrepreneur Elon Musk.

Robo-fear

But the way the story has been reported says more about cultural fears and representations of machines than it does about the facts of this particular case.

Plus, let's face it, robots just make for great villains on the big screen.

In the real world, though, AI is a huge area of research at the moment and the systems currently being designed and tested are increasingly complicated.

One result of this is that it's often unclear how neural networks come to produce the output that they do - especially when two are set up to interact with each other without much human intervention, as in the Facebook experiment.

That's why some argue that putting AI in systems such as autonomous weapons is dangerous.

It's also why ethics for AI is a rapidly developing field - the technology will surely be touching our lives ever more directly in the future.

But Facebook's system was being used for research, not public-facing applications, and it was shut down because it was doing something the team wasn't interested in studying - not because they thought they had stumbled on an existential threat to mankind.

It's important to remember, too, that chatbots in general are very difficult to develop.

In fact, Facebook recently decided to limit the rollout of its Messenger chatbot platform after it found many of the bots on it were unable to address 70% of users' queries.

Chatbots can, of course, be programmed to seem very humanlike and may even dupe us in certain situations - but it's quite a stretch to think they are also capable of plotting a rebellion.

At least, the ones at Facebook certainly aren't.

Did the first flower look like this?

All living flowers ultimately derive from a single ancestor that lived about 140 million years ago, a study suggests.

Scientists combined models of flower evolution with the largest data set of features from living flowers ever assembled.

From this the team was able to infer the appearance of the ancestral flower.

The flower had many concentric cycles of petal-like organs in sets of three, arranged in whorls, and was bisexual.

Hervé Sauquet, from Université Paris-Sud, France, one of the authors of the paper published this week in Nature Communications said: "There is no living flower that looks exactly like the ancestral one - and why should there be? This is a flower that existed at least 140 million years ago and has had considerable time to evolve into the incredible diversity of flowers that exist today."

We are all familiar with the beauty of flowers - the reproductive structures produced by about 90 % of all living land plants. But their origin and early evolution is a mystery. This is mainly owing to the lack of fossil flowers from the time period when the ancestor of living flowers is thought to have existed.

Dr Jason Hilton from the University of Birmingham, UK, who was not involved in the study, said: "The structure and organisation of the ancestral flower has remained enigmatic.

For instance, we don't know if the oldest flowers were unisexual or bisexual, or if they were pollinated by wind or insects."

To reconstruct the appearance of the first flower, the scientists recorded the features - such as the petals and sepals - of the flowers from 792 living species.

They mapped the distribution of these features on to the evolutionary tree of flowering plants enabling them to build a picture of what flowers looked like at key points in their history - including the last common ancestor of all living flowers.

The first flower is reconstructed with petal-like structures arranged in a whorl, so each petal appears in the same plane, like a common lily (but with more whorls), rather than in a spiral, where petals overlap in a spiral arrangement around the stem, like a lotus.

"For some of the features we studied, the result was surprising, especially the fact that organs (such as sepals and petals and the stamens) were probably arranged in whorls instead of spirals, as commonly assumed for the ancestral flower," said Hervé Sauquet.

Sex evolution in flowers has been highly debated. Flowers can be unisexual or bisexual and this study infers a bisexual early flower with both male and female organs.

"This study is important as it tells us how complicated the ancestral flower is likely to be - now the search is on to find it or something closely resembling it in the fossil record. That's if the model is correct - only time (and further study) will tell," said Jason Hilton.

Saudi Arabia plans luxury beach resorts on Red Sea

Saudi Arabia has launched a massive tourism development project that will turn 50 islands and other sites on the Red Sea into luxury resorts.

It hopes to attract both foreign tourists and domestic visitors as part of efforts to diversify the Saudi economy, as oil prices have fallen.

Visa restrictions on foreigners are to be eased in the tourist zone.

However, it is not clear whether dress codes and other restrictions in the conservative kingdom will be relaxed.

Alcohol, cinemas and theatres are prohibited in Saudi Arabia.

Women must wear loose-fitting, full-length robes known as "abayas" in public, as well as a headscarf if they are Muslim. They are not allowed to drive and often require a male guardian's permission to study or travel abroad.

Construction of the new resorts is due to start in 2019. The first phase will include developing a new airport as well as luxury hotels and housing, and is expected to be complete in 2022.

Saudi Arabia already plays host to millions of foreigners - for work and for the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.

But its austere religious and social codes, reflected in the ruggedness of the landscape, have hardly proved enticing to tourists - and until recently, that's how the Saudis liked it.

Now, with oil revenues falling, fresh ways of earning income and providing jobs for Saudis have been urgently sought.

Tourism has been earmarked as a key element of a new economic and social vision.

The tourism project is part of a plan, known as Vision 2030, spearheaded by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who was elevated to become the first in line to the Saudi throne in June.

The Red Sea development will be built along 125 miles (200km) of Saudi's western coastline, according to the Vision 2030 fund.

Among the attractions will be protected coral reefs, dormant volcanoes, and a nature reserve inhabited by rare wildlife like Arabian leopards and falcons.

Visitors will also be able to take trips to the ancient ruins of Madain Saleh, classified as a Unesco World Heritage site, and take part in activities such as parachuting, trekking and rock climbing.

More older adults 'may benefit from taking statins,' study reports

"Nearly all men over 60 and women over 75 eligible for statins, analysis suggests," The Guardian reports.

This is the finding of a study that aimed to see how many people in England would qualify for statin use if the 2014 NICE guidelines for statin therapy in adults were followed.

Statins are drugs designed to lower cholesterol, and in turn reduce the risk of a person developing a cardiovascular disease (CVD). The drugs are crucial for preventing another event occurring in people who already have CVD.

In 2014, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) produced guidelines that recommended that statins should also be prescribed for people with a 10% risk of developing CVD in the next 10 years.

The health watchdog selected a risk assessment tool called QRISK2 to estimate a person's risk of CVD based on a number of factors, such as body mass index (BMI), smoking history and whether family members had developed CVD.

This study cross-checked the NICE guidelines on statins with data from the 2011 Health Survey for England.

It found all men over 70 and all women aged 65-75 could potentially be offered statins based on the CVD risk associated with their age alone, regardless of how healthy they were.

Currently, around four million people are being treated with statins, so this would mean treating an extra seven million people.

It's not clear whether this would add to the NHS budget or actually save money in the long term by reducing the number of people who go on to develop CVD.

If you're concerned about your CVD risk, talk to your GP about the pros and cons of treatment.

Other ways to reduce your risk of CVD include stopping smoking, being more active, drinking less alcohol, eating more healthily, and achieving or maintaining a healthy weight.

Where did the story come from?

The study was carried out by an international team of researchers from the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health in the US, and the University of New South Wales and the University of Melbourne in Australia.

The researchers were funded by the Swedish Society of Medicine and Gålöstiftelsen, and the HCF Research Foundation.

They also used data from the Health Survey for England, which was funded by the Department of Health and the Health and Social Care Information Centre.

The study was published in the peer-reviewed British Journal of General Practice.

Coverage of the study in the UK press was mixed.

Some papers accurately reported the results of the research, providing useful information from independent experts, who discussed how statins fitted into the bigger picture of preventing CVD.

Other outlets were less helpful, focusing more on other aspects of the debate on whether or not people should take statins.

The Times' headline "Give statins to almost all men over 60, GPs are told" is misleading as it implies that the study made definitive recommendations on public health policy, which it did not.

What kind of research was this?

The aim of this study was to see how many people in England would qualify for statin use if the 2014 NICE guidelines for statin therapy in adults were followed.

This cross-sectional study took a sample of people at a single point in time.

The researchers used data taken from the Health Survey for England (HSE), which is carried out every year to look at health and health-related behaviour in a sample of adults and children.

The information provided by that survey was used to calculate people's risk of CVD to see whether or not they would be eligible for statins.

The researchers then used their findings to estimate how many people in the whole English population might be offered the drugs.

What did the research involve?

The 2014 NICE guidelines say that people who don't have a history of CVD and who have a risk of 10% or more of having CVD in the next 10 years should be offered statins to reduce their risk.

A person's CVD risk is based on the results of a computer-based tool called QRISK2, which uses information about people's lifestyle and health to make predictions about their future health.

The researchers first looked at the QRISK2 tool to see how the results of the tool varied according to what information was provided about the various risk factors it looks at. They then explored how the tool classified people's risk using data from the HSE study.

The researchers took data from a single year of the HSE in 2011. The people from that year who were eligible for this study:

• were aged between 30 and 84 years old
• had provided a blood sample
• had answered questions about lifetime history of CVD
• didn't have data missing that would be needed for the QRISK2 tool

In total, 2,972 people were included in the study. The researchers calculated a QRISK2 result for each of the study participants.

They then compared the results with the general population to estimate how many people in the whole of England might be eligible for statins.

The analysis carried out was suitable for this type of study. But the decision to exclude people who had data missing on some risk factors could introduce bias in the results if these people were different from the people included in the study.

What were the basic results?

The researchers estimated that all men over the age of 70 and all women aged 65-75 could potentially be offered statins, as all people in those groups would have a QRISK2 score of 10% or more.

This result applied even if they were otherwise healthy. For people with other risk factors, the age at which they might be offered statins would be lower. 

If the NICE guidelines were completely implemented, 11.8 million adults aged 30-84 could be offered statins to reduce their risk of CVD.

How did the researchers interpret the results?

The authors noted that the QRISK2 tool puts a lot of emphasis on age, which means older adults are likely to have statins recommended to them by this tool even if they don't have many other risk factors for CVD.

They also discussed some of the pros and cons, both for individuals and for the health service, of more people being prescribed statins.

For example, they estimated that if the NICE guidelines were followed, 290,000 CVD events might be prevented.

But more resources would be needed in the health service to properly screen, treat and monitor the patients who were offered statins.

Of the 9.8 million people without previous CVD who would be eligible for statins, 6.3 million aren't currently taking them.

The researchers stated that statin therapy should only be started following discussion between the doctor and patient, particularly if the main or only risk factor a person has is their age.

Conclusion

The study was an interesting analysis of how many more people in England could be eligible to receive statins than those currently receiving them.

It didn't make any recommendations about acting on these findings. The study was also unable to follow people over time to see whether statins might have made a difference.

And the study did have some limitations:

• Because it only looked at people at one point in time, we don't know whether the people who were considered at risk of CVD actually went on to develop it.
• The researchers were only able to use one year of data from HSE, as this was the only year that had the information they needed about people's history of CVD.
• Using more data may have detected trends, as CVD risk has changed in the population over time.
• The study assumed that people in the HSE population were representative of the general English population when estimating how many adults could be offered statins. Although the HSE study is designed to try to be representative, there may be situations the survey population doesn't match the general population for a specific risk factor or condition.

It's best to talk to your GP if you think you'd benefit from taking statins or you're already taking them but have questions.

If you can't take statins or don't want to take them, other ways you can lower your cholesterol include stopping smoking, being more active, drinking less alcohol, eating more healthily, and achieving or maintaining a healthy weight.

Pancreatic cancer trial: Early surgery boosts success rates

Speeding up access to surgery for pancreatic cancer patients diagnosed early enough increased success rates by a third, a pilot scheme has shown.

The Birmingham team said it had saved the NHS £3,200 per patient and could help hundreds of patients UK-wide.

The trial involved cutting average time to surgery for 32 patients from two months to just over two weeks - 31 had their tumours removed successfully.

But it will be two years before doctors know if operating earlier extends life.

About 9,600 people are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in the UK each year, and fewer than 7% live beyond five years. Very little progress has been made in treating the disease since the early 1970s.

Currently, just 8% of pancreatic cancer patients in the UK have surgery to successfully remove their tumour, because the majority are diagnosed at an advanced stage, when surgery is not an option.

Even if a patient is eligible for surgery, the chances of that surgery being a success are linked to how quickly it takes place.

The team at University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, led by pancreatic surgeon Keith Roberts, worked with hospitals to speed up referrals for patients and reorganised the way surgery was carried out.

They also cut out a treatment generally given to jaundiced patients before surgery, which was thought to reduce the risk of post-operative complications.

This involves putting a stent into the bile duct to relieve symptoms.

Speeding up time to surgery saw 31 out of 32 patients eligible for surgery go on to have successful treatment - a 97% success rate, compared with a current average of 75%.

Complications and hospital readmissions after surgery were also reduced.

Mr Roberts said: "We have shown that it is possible to create a much faster path to surgery for pancreatic cancer patients within the NHS, which could have a significant impact on survival.

"We carried out surgery earlier, avoided unpleasant and costly pre-surgery treatment, and yet there was no significant increase in complications post-surgery."

Alex Ford, of Pancreatic Cancer UK, which funded the study, said: "These results are incredibly exciting. Surgery is the only treatment for pancreatic cancer that can save lives. If we can ensure that hundreds more patients have their tumour successfully removed each year, it could be a huge breakthrough in treatment."

She said savings would be used to fund specialist nurses, who could help speed up the time to surgery still further.

Kate Rigby, 69, from Minsterley, near Shrewsbury, was fast-tracked to surgery as part of the pilot. She had surgery seven days after being diagnosed.

"Within a week of receiving my diagnosis, I had surgery to have my tumour removed. I barely had time to worry about undergoing such an extensive operation," she said.

"I had jaundice, but this wasn't treated prior to surgery and this hasn't caused me problems. People, including friends in the medical profession, have been astounded about how quickly I've been able to receive my treatment and how well I've recovered."