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“Against weak competitors, a strategic approach is probably useful, because if you figure out the approach of the opponent, you can actually do better than when you’re just random. You can even out-compete them,” Karpova said.

But random exploration may be more appropriate to a new situation full of mixed signals, where experience offers no guide. Some part of the brain has to decide how to decide.

Researchers set out to find how and where such choices are made. They created three computer opponents with increasingly tough strategies to punish patterns in how rats sought selected holes to poke their noses in, looking for food. One was a bit lenient; the second, a bit less forgiving; and the third, strict — it was programmed to learn from the rat and thwart its strategy.

“When animals initially played against the weak competitors, they appeared to maintain a strategic approach, just like people have observed before with primates,” Karpova said. “But when we put them up against a very sophisticated competitor … the animals switched to the random mode.”

And they got stuck there, for hundreds of trials.

Researchers weren’t done. They created a new brain-buster. It gave higher rewards for a certain pattern of pokes (such as right-right-left) but also mild reward rates (16%) for non-patterned responses.

The “strategic” rodents that had played against competitors one and two beat the odds at the hidden pattern task. Their reward rates, about 20%, indicated that sticking to strategic thinking helped them uncover the hidden pattern. Those that had first played the sternest computer taskmaster earned just a 14.5% reward rate, below even the random rate.

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Under a Fed mandate, the investment banking behemoth was expected to have a company-wide policy to address conflicts of interest in how its phalanxes of dealmakers handled clients. Although Goldman had a patchwork of policies, the examiner concluded that they fell short of the Fed’s requirements.

That finding by the examiner, Carmen Segarra, potentially had serious implications for Goldman, which was already under fire for advising clients on both sides of several multibillion-dollar deals and allegedly putting the bank’s own interests above those of its customers. It could have led to closer scrutiny of Goldman by regulators or changes to its business practices.

Before she could formalize her findings, Segarra said, the senior New York Fed official who oversees Goldman pressured her to change them. When she refused, Segarra said she was called to a meeting where her bosses told her they no longer trusted her judgment. Her phone was confiscated, and security officers marched her out of the Fed’s fortress-like building in lower Manhattan, just 7 months after being hired.

“They wanted me to falsify my findings,” Segarra said in a recent interview, “and when I wouldn’t, they fired me.”

Ukraine has been receiving gas from Hungary, Poland and Slovakia since Russia cut off supplies to Ukraine in June in a dispute over unpaid bills.

Ukraine’s state-owned gas firm, Naftogaz, confirmed the stoppage. It called the move “unexpected and unexplained”.

FGSZ said it cut deliveries to Ukraine to raise the flow of gas to Hungary.

With winter approaching fears are mounting that Ukraine will be unable to heat homes and power industry without Russian gas.

Bash is the software used to control the command prompt on many Unix computers. Hackers can exploit a bug in Bash to take complete control of a targeted system, security experts said.

The Department of Homeland Security’s United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, or US-CERT, issued an alert saying the vulnerability affected Unix-based operating systems including Linux and Apple Inc’s (AAPL.O) Mac OS X.

The “Heartbleed” bug allowed hackers to spy on computers but not take control of them, according to Dan Guido, chief executive of a cybersecurity firm Trail of Bits.

“The method of exploiting this issue is also far simpler. You can just cut and paste a line of code and get good results.”

Tod Beardsley, an engineering manager at cybersecurity firm Rapid7, warned the bug was rated a “10” for severity, meaning it has maximum impact, and rated “low” for complexity of exploitation, meaning it is relatively easy for hackers to launch attacks.

“Using this vulnerability, attackers can potentially take over the operating system, access confidential information, make changes, et cetera,” Beardsley said. “Anybody with systems using Bash needs to deploy the patch immediately.”

Now, there are calls to halt those transfers, even though some agencies say the weapons are necessary.

CBS News correspondent Manuel Bojorquez reports from the University of Texas, Arlington, that the University of Texas System’s police protect more than a dozen campuses and 330,000 people across the state.

The director of police said those additional weapons and gear are necessary, given the type of emergencies that can happen.

When University of Texas police responded to a bomb threat in 2012, they arrived in a Humvee. It’s one of three large military vehicles the university’s police system has acquired from the Department of Defense. They recently received a mine-resistant vehicle, which was designed to withstand roadside bombs on the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The turret has been removed, so there’s no weapons systems associated with it,” University of Texas System Director of Police Michael Heidingsfield said.

He says its purpose is to protect the occupants and save lives.

“That vehicle will be used solely in response to an active shooter or armed intruder events,” Heidingsfield said. “Or perhaps in anticipation of a major natural catastrophic event.”

The 20,000-word series enraged black communities, prompted Congressional hearings, and became one of the first major national security stories in history to blow up online. It also sparked an aggressive backlash from the nation’s most powerful media outlets, which devoted considerable resources to discredit author Gary Webb’s reporting. Their efforts succeeded, costing Webb his career. On December 10, 2004, the journalist was found dead in his apartment, having ended his eight-year downfall with two .38-caliber bullets to the head.

These days, Webb is being cast in a more sympathetic light. He’s portrayed heroically in a major motion picture set to premiere nationwide next month. And documents newly released by the CIA provide fresh context to the “Dark Alliance” saga — information that paints an ugly portrait of the mainstream media at the time.

The government’s first tranche of tougher anti-terrorism bills, which will beef up the powers of the domestic spy agency ASIO, passed the Senate by 44 votes to 12 on Thursday night with bipartisan support from Labor.

The bill, the National Security Legislation Amendment Bill (No. 1) 2014, will now be sent to the House of Representatives, where passage is all but guaranteed on Tuesday at the earliest.

Anyone – including journalists, whistleblowers and bloggers – who “recklessly” discloses “information … [that] relates to a special intelligence operation” faces up to 10 years’ jail.