USA NEW MEXICO HEALTH SCIENCE CENTER DISRUPTED BY A CYBER ATTACK
The University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center, which is the state’s only academic medical center and home to its only Level-1 trauma center, is responding to a cyber incident that forced the health system to suspend patient appointments, cancel classes and temporarily divert ambulances.
The UNM Health Sciences Center cyber incident, which also affected the UNM Health System’s clinical delivery IT systems, was discovered on Monday morning.
The incident – in which hackers reportedly claimed data theft – forced the health system’s 618-bed UNM Hospital in Albuquerque to divert all ambulance traffic to other hospitals, limit new patient admissions and cancel patient appointments, including outpatient surgeries, at all clinics and other facilities for several hours.
The flagship UNM Hospital handles 1 million patient visits, 80,000 emergency room patients and about 20,000 urgent care clinic patients per year, the university said.
The incident also affected UNM Sandoval Regional Medical Center, a 65-bed hospital in Rio Rancho, New Mexico.
By Tuesday, UNM Hospital and clinics were open and regularly scheduled patient appointments and procedures were resuming while the university’s IT security teams continued to respond to the incident.
UNM Health Sciences Center on Monday instructed all non-essential, non-clinical personnel and all students enrolled at the School of Medicine, College of Pharmacy, College of Nursing and College of Population Health to leave campus for the remainder of day.
The UNM Health Sciences schools were still closed on Tuesday, and non-essential employees were asked to remain home. But essential and clinical employees, along with students with clinical responsibilities, were instructed to report to their usual work or clinical locations on Tuesday.
Aleph Alpha Launches Kolibri: A Sovereign Open AI Model from Germany
German AI company Aleph Alpha released Kolibri, its new open-weight language model, on 3 October 2026, Germany’s Unity Day. The model is built for German and English. The company’s pitch is sovereignty: organisations can run it entirely on their own infrastructure instead of sending data to US or Chinese cloud services (Trending Topics).
Small, fast and German
Kolibri is a mixture-of-experts model with 78 billion parameters, but only about 3 billion are active for each token it processes. That makes it fast and cheap to run. It can handle up to one million tokens of context, enough for very long documents. More than 21% of its training data is German, and Aleph Alpha says it processes German text more efficiently than GPT-5, Gemini or Qwen. The model was trained on infrastructure in Germany and Finland. It was designed with the EU AI Act and GDPR in mind and released under the open Apache 2.0 licence, with full weights available on Hugging Face.
Kolibri has also been trained to say “I don’t know” when the answer isn’t in the documents it was given, which reduces made-up answers. It offers four reasoning levels, so users can trade cost against quality.
How it performs
In Aleph Alpha’s own benchmarks, Kolibri beats comparable models from Qwen, Nvidia and Mistral in maths, science and coding. It keeps up with rivals that use up to four times as many active parameters. Qwen still does better on agentic tasks and long-context work. The comparison also leaves out the newest Chinese open-weight models, and independent rankings have yet to list Kolibri. Aleph Alpha argues that public benchmarks don’t reflect what customers need, so it has built its own tests for public administration, automotive and aerospace.
Kolibri is aimed at public administration, industry and aerospace, where sensitive data has to stay in-house. It is one of the clearest examples yet of a European model built for sovereignty rather than scale. It also arrives at a turning point for Aleph Alpha, which has signed a binding agreement to merge with Canada’s Cohere. The combined company will operate under the Cohere name, with Heidelberg remaining a research hub.
