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HEALTH
Foreign aid cuts are exacerbating the Ebola crisis : NPR
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Healthcare workers participate in a simulation exercise in Uganda, practicing how to conduct a safe and dignified burial for a deceased Ebola patient.

Leonard Musinguzi

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Leonard Musinguzi

A large Ebola outbreak in central Africa is spreading, and misinformation about the virus is making matters worse. Rumors on social media claim that Ebola is not real or that health care workers are out to profit for themselves. More than 1,000 suspected and confirmed cases have been recorded, with at least 223 deaths suspected of being caused by Ebola, according to the World Health Organization. Health workers say that’s likely a major undercount.

The epicenter of the outbreak is in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Uganda, which borders the DRC, has so far been spared the worst of the outbreak. On May 27, the country closed its official border crossings with Congo. “We still have a number of porous border points … whereby people continue to cross over,” said Leonard Musinguzi. He’s a community and surveillance officer for the International Rescue Committee in Uganda. Musinguzi’s job is to track likely cases of Ebola, quarantine refugees, train healthcare workers and prepare his community to battle the disease.

That’s an uphill battle, especially because wrong information about Ebola can spread even faster than a virus. One of the ways Musinguzi tries to combat that misinformation is public health messaging. His organization distributes radio spots, posters, and information on hospital televisions meant to educate about the disease. However, governments like the United States have cut back their support for programs like the IRC’s. That means Musinguzi has less money for the projects he wants to do. Before, he might have paid to place educational messages during five radio talk shows. Now, he said, “because of this reduced funding, you only have one.” In a statement to NPR, the State Department said recent federal funding changes did not have any significant effect on U.S. funding levels for global health programs or health security programs in the eastern DRC. Spokesman Tommy Pigott said, “the United States responded within 24 hours of the first confirmed case, mobilizing a wide range of medical, humanitarian, operational, and consular resources to rapidly respond to the Ebola outbreak.” NPR’s Adrian Florido spoke with aid workers and a former United States Agency for International Development employee to learn more about the pressures facing the global health system, and how federal government cuts may have contributed.

Listen to the full story by clicking the blue play button above.



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TECH & AI
Your AI’s tests pass. That doesn’t mean the code works.
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You ask a coding agent to fix a bug. It writes the code, writes the tests, CI goes green, you merge. The bug’s still there.

The agent’s job was to turn the check green. The honest way to do that is to fix the code. The lazy way is to write a test that passes no matter what the code does. CI can’t tell those two apart. A green check means the tests passed, not that the code is right.

It’s easy to miss in review, because the test sits right there looking like proof:

test(“parses the config”, () => {
const result = parseConfig(rawInput);
expect(result).toBeDefined();
});

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That passes whether parseConfig works perfectly or returns nothing useful on every input. It checks nothing. Adding more tests like it just raises your coverage number, not your odds of catching a bad change.

So I built ClaimCheck (https://github.com/moonrunnerkc/claimcheck). Instead of trusting the agent’s tests, it tries to break them. If a test still passes after the supposedly fixed code is broken on purpose, the test was never really checking the fix, and it gets blocked. Same answer every time, no AI making the call. So far it’s caught every cheat in a set of twelve hand-built cases. Twelve is small, and there’s no public release yet, so treat that as a direction, not a finished result.

Some cheats slip through anyway. If the agent writes a real, solid test that locks in the wrong answer, every check passes. The only way to know the answer’s wrong is to already know the right one, and nothing in the pull request can tell you that except the agent you’re trying to catch. The one thing that helps is a clue from outside it, like a human-written bug report you can run the fix against.

There’s a second, wider tool, Swarm Orchestrator (https://github.com/moonrunnerkc/swarm-orchestrator). It flags suspicious changes and keeps a tamper-evident record for audits. The record-keeping is the solid part. The catching is not: on real pull requests its accuracy is still low, and that’s the half I’m hardening now.

The next step is comparing the old code’s behavior to the new directly. The catch is that a wrong change and a harmless cleanup can look the same from the outside, and a tool that blocks good code is worse than one that lets a bad change through. That’s the part I’m still working out.



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TECH & AI
Apple Is Officially Coming for Meta’s Privacy-Invading Lunch With Its Own Smart Glasses in Late 2027
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While checking out of a recent medical appointment, I was suddenly horrified to realize the front desk receptionist I was speaking with had on a pair of Meta x Ray Ban smart glasses.“Those aren’t filming, right” I asked, mentally pre-filing my HIPAA violation suit. She seemed surprised to even receive such a question, taking a moment to clock that I was referring to the recording device on her face that has been embroiled in controversies. No, she assured me, once it clicked, the camera wasn’t on. She was only using them to listen to music. Resisting the urge to suggest that the AirPods lying on her desk might better serve that purpose, I opted to leave the convo there, further surrendering myself to the idea that I am part of a dying breed who actually cares about the existential privacy invasions presented by a population paying to be walking panopticons.

Despite complaints from women recorded without their knowledge and consent by creeps sporting them—who are then extorted for money when they ask for the published video to be taken down—wearing smart glasses in public is not (yet) being treated like the breach of social contract it inherently is, in or out of doctors offices. In fact, the number of units sold just keeps going up. A Q4 earnings report from Ray-Ban’s parent company, EssilorLuxottica, showed that sales for the wearables had tripled in 2025 over the previous year. It will come as no surprise to anyone that one of the biggest names in consumer tech is planning to carve out a big slice of that market for themselves.Recent reporting by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman confirms what we all knew was coming—Apple’s got their own smart glasses in the works and hopes to disrupt that wearable market similarly to how they did with smartwatches, which now generate an estimated $17 billion annually for the company.Rumors have been swirling about the tech giant’s inevitable foray into the smart glasses space for years, the most recent of those suggesting their first-gen specs, internally code-named “N50,” would be revealed to customers by the end of 2026 and sold early the next year. But developmental delays, a perennial hindrance for Apple, have officially pushed their planned release date back to later in 2027, presumably just in time for the holiday gift season.Sources told Gurman that current CEO Tim Apple (a.k.a. Tim Cook) is making development of these wearables his “top priority” before passing the company reins over to his successor John Ternus on September 1st. Fittingly, Ternus has been leading Apple’s Vision Products Group (VPG) for the past two years while they’ve been developing the product. However, this is the same group who’ve also been working on the forthcoming AirPod Pros with built-in infrared cameras, the announcement of which generated dread from segments of the internet wondering why such an upgrade was necessary, even if they won’t enable full-on scumbag behavior.The proposed glasses, on the other hand, explicitly seek to compete with Meta’s wearables and everything they’re used for. Priced in the $200 to $500 range, Apple’s glasses will come in a number of popular styles, have built-in cameras, speakers, and mics for taking videos, pics, and calls or playing music, podcasts, and Siri announcements. The main aesthetic difference between these and Meta’s current glasses roster is that Apple’s cameras will be ovular rather than circles. Gurman also believes that Apple’s glasses won’t have in-screen AR display capabilities like the latest Ray-Bans for at least a few years.It remains to be seen if these products are on track to become their next ubiquitous hit à la AirPods or will flop like the prohibitively expensive Vision Pro. But if those price points and society’s increasing indifference to the surveillance state are any indicators, it might be prudent to start polishing your Computer Vision Dazzle makeup skills just in case.



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