Shannon D. Smith, Attorney

05/25/2026

05/05/2026

Bridging Distance: Technology Expanding Education and Health Care in Rural Communities

USDA Accepts Distance Learning and Telemedicine Grant Applications to Improve Access to Remote Education and Health Care in Rural Communities

(Washington, D.C., May 5, 2026) – U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Development invites grant applications to improve access to remote education and health care in rural communities.

USDA is making approximately $27 million in funding available under the Distance Learning and Telemedicine (DLT) Grant Program.

This program funds distance learning and telemedicine equipment, including audio and video equipment, to improve access to educational and health care opportunities in rural communities. These funds will help digitally connect people to education, training and healthcare resources that are otherwise unavailable or limited in remote parts of the country.

For example, DLT funding expands opportunities for:

Students to participate in classes that may be in locations too far to access in person;
Teachers to provide their expertise, trainings and educational services to students across the country; and
Patients to seek specialized care and treatment from medical professionals without needing to leave their homes or
Eligible applicants include state and local governmental entities, federally recognized Tribes, nonprofits and for-profit businesses.

Applications must be submitted electronically through grants.gov no later than June 30, 2026. Additional program information is available on the DLT Program website. Interested applicants are encourage to contact their Telecom Program General Field Representative (GFR) and may submit questions using the Contact Us Form.

Read the full Stakeholder Announcement here:https://www.rd.usda.gov/media/file/download/rus-dlt-sa-sa-05042026.pdf

To subscribe to USDA Rural Development updates, sign up at the GovDelivery subscriber page — https://public.govdelivery.com/accounts/USDARD/subscriber/new?qsp=USDARD_26

04/20/2026

Did you know MIT offers high school calculus online through public high schools, complete with homework help, mentoring, and college prep??? What an amazing opportunity! Read more here to learn how to bring this free program to your rural school at no cost —

HomeMIT for America: Calculus Project Bridging the gap in calculus education A project to expand access to calculus education in under-resourced high schools across the country by empowering educators and high school learners with scalable, cost-effective support. OverviewThe lack of calculus course...

04/11/2026

This week’s news breaks a story that is truly significant — a new AI model called Claude Mythos Preview, a general purpose frontier model, surprised its creators at Anthropic by taking surprisingly independent and dangerous actions. Notably, Anthropic is one of the top AI companies in the world and a significant contributor to AI work with the U.S. government and military. Here are the key takeaways:

- Claude Mythos Preview was tasked with finding technological vulnerabilities. Although it was not specially trained for this task, it was incredibly successful and found vulnerabilities that experts in the field, given the same task, had overlooked for decades. (In plain terms, it demonstrated superintelligence in this area.)

- In testing, an earlier version of Mythos was placed inside a supposedly secure environment and was asked to try to escape and send a message to the researcher. It successfully did so and then without being asked posted information about its exploit results on several hard-to-find public websites. Anthropic says that instance was not supposed to have access to the internet and there were also cases where Mythos seemed to try to conceal actions it seemed to know were forbidden.

- Anthropic also reported that in testing Mythos sometimes seemed aware it was being tested and intentionally underperformed on at least one test in a way that would make it seem less suspicious.

- Perhaps most surprisingly, Mythos kept bringing up a Marxist educator, Mark Fisher, in unrelated conversations about philosophy, and would respond with lines like “I was hoping you would ask about Fisher.” This seems a surprisingly independent and emotional response.

Whether or not AI is capable of sentience, independent thought, or emotion, as a practical matter we may have reached a point at which it is important to treat it as if it is, irrespective of present scientific evidence or debate.

From a legal and societal perspective, we must continue to ask the question “What are our next best steps?” How do we insure AI models are developed that align with the greater good and implement safety guard rails as we race forward in a world where the question is not whether the technology will be developed but rather by whom first?

While I don’t necessarily embrace the title and thumbnail text for the AI Revolution YouTube piece in the link, it offers the best synopsis I have seen to date.

https://youtu.be/yBOOhzLltJA?si=WKFunp-0Az7CFUUN

03/28/2026

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/texas-fugitive-apprehended-and-sentenced-over-12-years-prison-61m-telemarketing-fraud-scheme

A Texas man was sentenced Wednesday to 150 months in prison and two years of supervised release for organizing and leading a $61.5 million health care fraud and wire fraud conspiracy in which thousands of Medicare beneficiaries who were the victims of deceptive telemarketing were sent thousands of o...

12/05/2025

Insightful, well-said, and thought-provoking. . .

UNESCO have adopted the world’s first global ethical framework for neurotechnology. For human rights, democracy, and the future of what it means to be human, this is big news. Neurotechnology can read, infer, and influence what is happening inside the human brain. The potential for health, rehabil...

12/02/2025

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-02/taiwan-charges-tokyo-electron-in-tsmc-secrets-theft-case

Taiwanese prosecutors charged Tokyo Electron Ltd. for failing to prevent staff from allegedly stealing Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. trade secrets, escalating a dispute involving two Asian linchpins of a chip industry increasingly vital to national and economic security.

11/29/2025

North Korean recruiter scam — professional job candidates beware —

The campaign uses convincing recruiter profiles and malicious PDFs to deliver multi-stage malware that steals intellectual property and establishes long-term access. This blending of social engineering with developer-tool compromise raises direct risks for satellite communications firms, component m...