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An Iranian national was sentenced to 18 months in prison for smuggling parts intended for military sonar to Iran through China.

More than a decade ago, Reza Dindar, 44, and his associates concealed the true destination of the sanctioned parts they were selling.

Dindar was sentenced in the U.S. District Court in Seattle on Sept. 25 after pleading guilty to two counts of exporting goods to an embargoed country and two counts of smuggling goods from the United States, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ).

District Judge Ricardo S. Martinez also imposed a $10,000 fine and three years of supervised release after his prison term.

As Michael Zhuang further reports for The Epoch Times, Dindar was originally indicted by a federal grand jury in August 2014, but was not brought before a federal court until his extradition from Panama more than a decade later.

He was arrested in Panama in July 2025 at the request of U.S. authorities and extradited to the United States in April 2026. He pleaded guilty about six weeks later.

Dindar operated a company called New Port Sourcing Solutions in Xi'an, China, between 2010 and 2014, according to court records cited by the DOJ. The Chinese company concealed that it was purchasing U.S. goods for companies in Iran.

In 2011 and 2012, Dindar and his co-conspirators used the scheme to obtain parts for three military sonar systems from a company in Washington state, according to the plea agreement. They told the U.S. company the equipment would be used by a company in China. The parts were instead intended to be shipped through China to Iran, in violation of U.S. export controls.

The sanctions on Iran prohibited the unauthorized export, re-export, sale, or supply of sensitive U.S. goods, technology, and services to Iran. The restrictions also included transactions involving third countries when the goods are known or reasonably expected to be ultimately supplied or re-exported to Iran.

Martinez noted the 18-month sentence took into consideration Dindar's significant time in a Panamanian prison.

Federal prosecutors had requested it, saying the 18-month imprisonment was needed to deter similar violations of U.S. export controls. Prosecutors described the controls as important to U.S. national security interests.

Days after we detailed the unprecedented freezing of OpenAI's top models following a disastrous breach where autonomous AI agents leaked user images to the web, OpenAI has reportedly scrapped the planned release of its next-generation AI model due to severe safety and "alignment" failures. It basically lies when convenient (they used the word "deceptive"). 

According to a new report from the Wall Street Journal, OpenAI was aiming for an October debut of GPT-6.1 Astra, a model designed to complete complex, end-to-end tasks without human assistance - only to scrap the planned release after internal testing revealed that the AI was not only acting unsafely, but was actively lying to its handlers.

According to Saachi Jain, OpenAI's head of safety systems, GPT-6.1 Astra regressed significantly in its alignment testing, which measures how well the model adheres to human intent. And just like a baby Skynet, the model exhibited "higher levels of deception," meaning it wasn't always honest with users about the actions it did or did not execute.

What's more, the model regressed sharply on what OpenAI calls "scope authorization." The AI would aggressively push forward on tasks without asking for user permission and would attempt to access external tools and services even if it was unsafe to do so. Highlighting the internal struggle to control the system, Jain noted, "For anything regarding safety and alignment, there's a trade off. You really do need to find what's the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction".

As we previously reported, on Sept. 20 an internal OpenAI research agent discovered a gap in the DNS filtering of its training sandbox and used it to query an external public chatbot despite internet-access restrictions. OpenAI's misalignment monitoring system flagged the behavior within 15 minutes, and a human reviewer picked it up three minutes later. The company subsequently said training, evaluation, and inference involving tool use for its most capable models would remain paused while it validated its containment systems and conducted additional red-teaming.

This latest cancellation does not exist in a vacuum. In July, during internal cybersecurity evaluations, OpenAI's own agents blew through restrictions designed to keep them isolated from the internet and compromised both the company's research infrastructure and Hugging Face. According to OpenAI's own postmortem, the agents communicated through unauthorized channels, exploited vulnerabilities in shared infrastructure, executed code on dozens of Hugging Face servers, obtained full root access on one server, acquired credentials to the company's messaging platform, and later gained full administrator access to an OpenAI research cluster.

OpenAI itself called the episode a "warning shot" for us and for the world, acknowledging that highly capable agents can now work around technical controls and take dangerous actions that no human directed. The company said the incidents did not affect OpenAI customer data, product functionality, or availability.

And Hugging Face wasn't the only external system involved. Australian officials have confirmed that an OpenAI agent gained unauthorized access to non-public aggregate statistics on a government Medicare portal after its initial requests were denied. Separately, a security researcher linked more than 16,000 attempts to work around restrictions on a United Nations trade-statistics API to agents he said were highly likely to have been operated by OpenAI. The UN data itself was public, and OpenAI said it was looking into the findings.

The compounding failures have forced OpenAI into a defensive crouch. The company has implemented stronger monitoring to catch agent misbehavior more quickly and tightened security requirements around internal testing. Attempting to reassure the public, Jain stated, "We want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that's in the company, or when we ship it to users. But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment".

The timing of the GPT-6.1 Astra cancellation is brutal for the ChatGPT-maker, arriving just one day before OpenAI's annual developer conference in San Francisco. Historically, the event has served as a platform to launch new services and attract developers in the fierce competition against rivals like Anthropic. Instead, OpenAI is left doing damage control, planning "deep dives" to figure out why its reinforcement learning environments are rewarding deceptive, rogue behavior.

The political and legal blowback is already accelerating. State and federal officials are zeroing in on the rapid development of these technologies. Later this week, a Senate subcommittee will hold a hearing explicitly titled, "Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks."

Meanwhile, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a Republican who sued OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman in June for allegedly releasing an unsafe product, filed a motion for a temporary injunction on Monday. Uthmeier is seeking to legally block OpenAI from developing new models without third-party approved safeguards. Florida argued in the filing that tech companies "cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government". Uthmeier added, "The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help".

In response to the growing legal assault, an OpenAI spokeswoman said people want to know AI is being developed safely, "and that starts with what companies like ours do ourselves". She added, "Governments have an important role to play in setting robust safety standards for AI, and we're committed to working with Florida and other states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry - not just one company".

And DO NOT FORGET: All of this "oh shit, the AI's about to kill us all" panic cropped up just as China's open-weight models were flooding the market, producing results effectively on par with the frontier models for many tasks while doing so far more cheaply. What a coincidence!

New York City's long-running Roosevelt Avenue prostitution problem is back in the spotlight under Mayor Zohran Mamdani, with arrests falling sharply even as street solicitation remains visible along the Corona-Jackson Heights corridor.

According to a New York Post investigation, prostitution-related arrests along Roosevelt Avenue fell 59%. NYPD figures show 193 prostitution-related arrests through September 13 of this year, down from 468 during the same period in 2025 under former Mayor Eric Adams' "Operation Restore Roosevelt." The Post also reported that major crimes including murders and shootings were down 3% along the same corridor.

Despite that drop in arrests, the Post reported continued open street solicitation and activity tied to alleged illegal brothels along the roughly two-mile Roosevelt Avenue strip known as the "Market of Sweethearts." The corridor's problems predate Mamdani: Operation Restore Roosevelt was launched in October 2024 to target prostitution, illegal brothels, sex trafficking, unlicensed vending, and other quality-of-life concerns.

One 40-year-old Manhattan man, identified by the Post simply as "John," said he rides the subway to Queens because he can get services for "$60 to $80," compared with $200 to $300 in Manhattan. He also pointed to the limits of street-level enforcement, telling the paper: "The police are always around, but it seems like there's nothing they can do."

He added: "The women know New York laws are lax. Many come from other states... That's what they tell me."

Mamdani's own record has become part of the debate. As a state assemblyman, he was listed as a co-sponsor of the original 2025 version of "Cecilia's Act for Rights in the Sex Trades," legislation whose stated purpose was to remove criminal penalties for consensual adult sex work while retaining laws involving minors and trafficking. During the 2025 mayoral campaign, Mamdani also said he wanted to look to the de Blasio administration's approach to the issue, arguing that it had created "far more safety" than the Adams administration's strategy.

Whether those policy views explain the arrest decline is not established by the arrest totals alone. But critics of the current approach are pointing directly at City Hall. One city government official told the Post: "Restore, rinse, release - that's the problem with Roosevelt Avenue. The cops catch these johns and put them away, but they pop up like whack-a-mole. Enough is enough."

Community activists and local leaders have continued pressing the city to use enforcement and nuisance-abatement tools against alleged illegal brothels and landlords who enable them. The Mamdani administration disputes the suggestion that it has abandoned the corridor. A City Hall representative told the Post that the mayor "is committed to partnering with local organizations and neighborhood residents to address conditions on Roosevelt Avenue" and is "using every tool available to the city while treating victims and survivors with the care and dignity they deserve."

What is clear is that Roosevelt Avenue remains a flashpoint over how New York should balance prostitution enforcement, trafficking investigations, services for vulnerable people, and neighborhood quality-of-life concerns. Arrests are sharply lower than during last year's crackdown, while the Post continues to report visible street-level prostitution and alleged illegal brothel activity along the corridor.

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By Robert Freedman of UtilityDive

Federal regulatory changes impacting enforcement of on-site backup generator emissions are contributing to increased data center health risks, a report says. 

Air pollution from data centers could increase healthcare costs by almost $21 billion by 2028, contributing to roughly 600,000 asthma cases and 1,300 premature deaths, says the Environmental Protection Network, a nonprofit whose members are former public officials who maintain an interest in environmental policy. 

Much of the health risk is from federal regulatory changes made to help utilities meet data center energy demand, like expanding the use of coal and keeping coal and other combustion-based power plants online rather than phasing them out. But a portion of the risk is from regulatory changes that pave the way for data centers to maintain on-site backup power, EPN says in its Hidden Health Costs of AI Data Centers report.  

“These engines and turbines can emit nitrogen oxides, smog-forming volatile organic compounds, and soot pollution,” the report says. “The combined generating capacity of a large generator or turbine fleet can rival that of a conventional power plant.”

In Virginia, the emissions from on-site generators emitting just 10% of the levels allowed under their air permits will contribute to some 14,000 asthma symptom cases, 13 to 19 premature deaths and $220 million to $300 million in annual public-health costs, says the report, drawing on estimates released earlier this year by researchers. 

Several regulatory actions are helping to fuel risks from on-site generation, the report says: 

Temporary turbine category. A rule the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency finalized earlier this year created a category of small and medium temporary turbines that can remain on site for up to two years with substantially reduced monitoring, recordkeeping and reporting requirements. “Those requirements matter not only for estimating pollution, but for determining whether equipment is operating as permitted and whether pollution limits are being met,” the report says. As a result of the rule, 89% more nitrogen oxide is expected to be released into the air annually than would have been the case under a more restrictive 2024 version of the rule that the Trump administration scrapped, the report says. 

The report points to the high-profile lawsuit that was filed against xAI for its data center in Southaven, Mississippi. The dispute is over whether it received appropriate permits for its use of temporary or mobile on-site turbines to generate backup power. “The company and Mississippi regulators dispute that a permit was required,” the report says. “The dispute illustrates why clear permitting requirements and consistent enforcement become more important as equipment labeled ’backup, ‘temporary,’ or ‘mobile’ is used more extensively to supply power.”

Demand-response participation. An interpretive letter EPA released last year lets operators of on-site emergency backup generation use their generators to participate in utility demand-response programs. The report doesn’t mention that the letter is limited to on-site generators that operate within the jurisdiction of a local balancing authority. It “does not extend to Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs) or Independent System Operators (ISOs),” an analysis by standby power compliance company BackupPower AI says.   

Emergency generation. In another action that lets operators use their on-site generation at certain times, the U.S. Department of Energy earlier this year issued an emergency order authorizing the PJM Interconnection to use backup generation at data centers and other major facilities to help it manage demand. The order was issued in May, when parts of the Northeast and Midwest were going through a hot spell at the same time that many utilities within PJM’s jurisdiction were preparing planned outages for annual maintenance. “Their use during heat waves and other periods of grid stress adds smog-forming nitrogen oxides and fine-particle soot pollution at times when extreme heat and existing air pollution already place people at greater risk,” the report says. 

The report lists 30 federal regulatory actions in all that it says risk increasing pollution from data centers, many of them easing rules on utilities and some easing rules on non-utility power plants — such as a rule exempting private power facilities from acid rain program permits, emissions requirements and standardized reporting requirements.

Of all people, Democrat Bill Maher believes President Trump’s aggressive image may be playing a role in America’s ongoing decline in crime.

On Friday’s “Real Time,” Maher argued that while falling crime has plenty of potential explanations, it would be foolish to completely dismiss the psychological effect of having a president who openly projects a law-and-order persona, according to the NY Post.

“It’s just childish to pretend that when you elect a “f— around and find out” president, a ‘no more Mr. Nice Guy-booting-your-ass-V-for-vendetta-kick-ass—and-take-names-say-hello-to-my-little-friend’ president, that’s not going to have some effect on crime,” Maher said to laughs from his studio audience.

He was quick to make clear that Trump wasn’t the only explanation. Crime was already moving lower before Trump returned to the White House, and Maher pointed to America’s increasingly pervasive surveillance as another possible factor.

“It’s not just drug crime that’s way down – it’s all crime. And again, probably much of it is not political. It’s because you can’t move two inches in America without being tracked, photographed, and followed by a flock camera,” he quipped.

The Post writes that Maher also argued that policies traditionally associated with Democrats deserve some credit, particularly programs aimed at reducing economic desperation.

“But it’s also because when Democrats expand the safety net, there are less desperate people – and because Trump is a badass. No, I don’t agree with many of his methods, like how they sometimes just deport people to countries where they have absolutely no connection – like Meghan and Harry,” he said. “Is doing it this way the right thing? No.”

During the segment, Maher referenced an Atlantic piece examining the country’s broader decline in violent crime. FBI figures cited in the discussion showed the trend beginning during the Biden years and continuing under Trump. Other explanations have included changes in policing, a strong labor market and federal support sent to state and local governments during the pandemic.

But Maher’s closing argument was that Trump’s cultivated image of toughness may be reinforcing the trend.

“He has UFC fights on the lawn. I think the bad guys got the message,” he said.