Axios

U.S. officials are defending their work with Venezuelan businessman Alejandro Betancourt in the unprecedented White House move to effectively gain control over huge oilfields in the country.

• They're also confirming the Trump administration's support for Venezuela's elections.

Why it matters: Betancourt is the colorful and controversial figure who heads North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP), the oil company partnering with the administration in the agreement that gives the U.S. preferential access to output from 17 major fields.

A U.S. Postal Service whistleblower is alleging the agency defied court orders while rushing to build a new ballot system that could reject thousands of mail ballots.

The big picture: The whistleblower says the Postal Service built the system in weeks, not the nine months to a year normally needed for a project of this complexity.

Under current systems, AI labs can no longer guarantee that AI agents won't swarm and escape their testing environments.

Why it matters: The attack on Hugging Face by OpenAI agents was a warning shot — and researchers say better security controls alone won't prevent similar incidents as AI agents become more capable.