A new book says Dutch spies spent months watching Jared Kushner's iPhone screen in real time, and one of the things they saw him open was a bank account with about $750 million in it. They got in because the Russians had already hacked the phone, and the Dutch found a way to ride along. Here's how it went down, according to Matthew Cole's reporting in Vanity Fair. In late 2017, Dutch military intelligence found out a Russian GRU officer was about to travel to the UK. The guy was a dark-web hacker who dealt in stolen bank data. The Dutch gave him two options, work for them or get picked up by the British, and he picked the Dutch. He then handed over access to a GRU server in Rostov, and sitting on that server were screenshots from Kushner's iPhone X. So Russian military intelligence was already inside the phone of the man running America's Middle East policy. From there, Dutch hackers in The Hague figured out how the Russians pulled it off and built their own way in. Cole says they could see his screen whenever he was using it, and they saved every frame. Sound was the one thing they couldn't get. Think about what that means for anyone who uses WhatsApp or Signal. The encryption does its job while a message is flying between two phones. Once it pops up on a hacked screen, whoever's watching just reads it right along with you. End-to-end encryption stops at your screen. That's relevant here, because back in 2019 the head of House Oversight said Kushner's own lawyer had confirmed he used WhatsApp for official White House business and kept records by screenshotting his chats. The lawyer pushed back on parts of that account. The Dutch have pulled this kind of thing on Russia before. In 2014, their spies got inside the network of Cozy Bear, the Russian hacking crew later tied to the DNC hack. They even took over the security camera in the hallway outside the hackers' office near Red Square and had photos of everybody walking in and out. When Cozy Bear went after the State Department that November, the Dutch tipped off Washington, and the Americans reportedly sent them cake and flowers as a thank-you. As for the money, Cole alleges the Saudi and Emirati rulers put at least $2 billion into accounts tied to Kushner during Trump's first term. Kushner says every word is false and that the author never produced a single bank record. His lawyer is threatening to sue. The full book comes out October 27, so we're about to find out who has the receipts. If Cole's sources hold up, there's a hard drive somewhere in The Hague with a frame-by-frame replay of the most sensitive phone in Trump's first White House.

Scorpions kill more than 3,250 people a year, mostly kids, and the cure is still made by milking venom from thousands of scorpions and injecting it into horses. Anthropic just let a team of investment researchers with zero biology background try to cut the horse out. The horse method is over a century old. You immunize the animal for months, draw its blood, and purify out the antibodies its immune system made. Given early, it works against a narrow set of toxins, and because you're putting horse protein into a child, it can trigger anaphylaxis. Barely anyone makes it, because the people getting stung can't pay enough to cover the factory. Mexico has about a quarter of the world's scorpion stings and relies on a single lab. Last year in Sonora, a 5-year-old was stung at preschool and rushed to a public hospital that had already burned through a shipment delivered days earlier. Staff found more 45 minutes later. She'd already gone into cardiac arrest twice. So Citrini Research walked into Anthropic with a question. Could motivated amateurs with Claude make real progress on a disease the drug industry ignores? An internal Claude model ran for 64 hours off one prompt and four follow-ups. It drove 12 protein design tools, generated 318,484 candidate molecules, ran 553,052 simulated matchups against five scorpion toxins, and picked 180 to build. Then it emailed the order to the lab itself. Two labs made 211 of them. 17 latched onto their target toxin, covering scorpions from Mexico, North Africa and the Middle East. Brazil's yellow scorpion beat every single design. The best two grab a Mexican scorpion toxin at the same spot as an antibody already shown to protect mice. The computer finished in under three days. The lab work stretched past a month, held up by contracts, shipping, and the hassle of sourcing the toxins themselves. One of the outside experts who reviewed the results said binding is no longer the main bottleneck. There's no antivenom yet. None of these molecules has touched a living cell or a mouse. Anascorp, the only scorpion antivenom the FDA has approved, took 35 years to go from a Mexican lab to US approval. The first candidate molecules for a horse-free successor took 64 hours, for a team whose day job is writing investment research.