NEW YORK, Aug. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Accrete, the cognitive infrastructure company building Knowledge Engines for autonomous work, today announced that it has been awarded a sole-source contract by the U.S. Marine Corps to deliver Argus for Cognitive Advantage.

The award was made on a sole-source basis. Under the award, Accrete will license its Expert AI Agents to the U.S. Marine Corps to help achieve cognitive advantage, enabling more informed, confident decisions.

Adversaries increasingly compete below the threshold of armed conflict, using coordinated narratives, synthetic media, and inauthentic amplification to shape perceptions faster than human analysts can track. Rather than treating open-source data as a search problem, Argus for Cognitive Advantage tracks, analyzes, and visualizes narrative development across the complete information environment — OSINT, open web, social media, broadcast media, messaging platforms, and foreign-language outlets. Accrete’s Knowledge Engine platform, which powers the Expert AI Agent Argus for Cognitive Advantage, converts the institutional knowledge of experienced practitioners into expert AI agents that surface the most relevant, use-case-specific signals across every accessible network. This significantly reduces analytic time and produces the detailed reporting required for timely decision-making.

In a world driven by visual media, rapid analysis is paramount — and this is where Argus for Cognitive Advantage’s video vision stands out. It reduces hours of video content to analysis in minutes, transcribing and translating speech, detecting objects and scene content, and inferring location cues — turning clips that once had to be watched end to end into searchable, attributable evidence, including video posted in languages the analyst does not read.

Additional product capabilities include:

Narrative intelligence. Narrative engines, stance detection, and predictive simulation track how conversations evolve and resonate.Audience simulation. The Audience Simulation Agent segments an audience and simulates how each segment will react to a message before it is released, compressing a weeks-long analytic task into a single workflow.Measures of effectiveness. Automated assessments quantify mission outcomes.Global reach. Real-time translation and transcription across 243 languages, spanning sources including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube, Reddit, Telegram, Weibo, and VKontakte.Argus Chat. Analysts query the data in plain language.Trusted AI by design. Every inference is traceable to its source, within auditable, accreditation-ready boundaries.

“Cognitive advantage is a warfighting requirement, not a support function, and this award reflects the Marine Corps’ clear recognition of that,” said Bill Wall, CEO of Accrete AI Government. “Furthermore, this sole-source award demonstrates the trust Accrete has built across the Department of War services. Accrete is proud to expand its reach within the Department of War by supporting the U.S. Marine Corps.”

Accrete first deployed Argus with the Department of War in 2022, followed by a multi-million dollar U.S. Army contract in 2024 to advance the capability for Army information operations. Argus for Cognitive Advantage was selected for a 2025 AFWERX STRATFI award to transition its technology from prototype to operational use.

“Knowledge Engines are dynamic context recorders, and the advantage begins the moment an organization presses record. The most valuable context in any institution is the know-how trapped in the heads of its best people. Organizations that never capture it are ceding compounding advantage to adversaries and competitors that do. Argus for Cognitive Advantage is one of the most sophisticated applications of the Knowledge Engine platform, and Accrete is proud to extend it to the Marine Corps as it counters adversaries operating against the United States every day through digital channels,” said Prashant Bhuyan, Founder, CEO, and Chairman of Accrete, Inc.

About Accrete

Accrete builds cognitive infrastructure for government and enterprise customers. Founded in 2017, Accrete’s Knowledge Engine platform unifies fragmented systems, siloed data, tacit knowledge, and decision-making into a continuously learning universal system of intelligence. Knowledge Engines give agents the shared context to reason, collaborate, decide, and act across the full complexity of an organization. As AI makes intelligence abundant, judgment is the scarce resource, and Accrete’s Knowledge Engines encode the expert judgment organizations accumulate over decades so agents can be trusted with consequential decisions. Accrete’s customers span Fortune 500 enterprises as well as U.S. defense and national security agencies. From commercial operations to national security missions, Accrete’s platform enables expert agents that deliver superintelligence purpose-built for high-stakes environments. Accrete AI Government LLC, based in Alexandria, VA, is the federal subsidiary of New York-based Accrete, Inc.

Media Contact
Megan Thatford
Accrete
megan.thatford@accrete.ai

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SOURCE Accrete

WASHINGTON, Aug. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — National Press Club President Mark Schoeff Jr. released the following statement today:

“The firing of Erik Slavin, editor of Stars and Stripes, is another brazen attempt by the Pentagon to dictate coverage of the military and should be immediately reversed. 

Firing a newspaper editor after he publicly defended his newsroom’s editorial independence is deeply troubling, and it should concern every journalist and every member of the U.S. military who depends on independent reporting. 

This is an assault on the fundamental principle that journalists must be free to report the news without fear of retaliation from the government officials they cover. The Pentagon must reaffirm that principle and make clear that Stars and Stripes journalists will not be punished for doing their jobs.

Today’s action comes on the heels of Stars and Stripes’ publisher Max Lederer’s resignation announcement, in which he asserted his values and understanding of the mission of the outlet “differ in fundamental ways from the direction of the leadership of the Department of Defense.” The Defense Department also sent him a separation notice today.

This disturbing pattern follows the firing in April of the global news organization’s ombudsman, a role established and charged by Congress to provide independent oversight and protect the paper’s editorial integrity, and a March memo that asserted content restrictions and expanded Pentagon oversight of the newsroom. 

For more than 150 years, Stars and Stripes has served a unique and vital role: delivering independent, fact-based reporting to U.S. service members, many serving our country far from their homes and in harm’s way.

In firing the editor of Stars and Stripes, Pentagon leadership is making clear their view that the newsroom should exist not as an independent outlet whose reporting serves to benefit U.S. troops, but as a mouthpiece to parrot Pentagon talking points. 

Our service members deserve news and information they can trust, not narratives that are shaped solely by their own employer. Our military — and the public — deserve better.”

About the National Press Club

Founded in 1908, the National Press Club is the world’s leading professional organization for journalists. With 2,500 members, the Club is a leading voice for press freedom in the U.S. and worldwide.

Contact: Dan Griffin, Communications Director of the National Press Club, media@press.org. 

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SOURCE National Press Club

NEW YORK, Aug. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Lazard Global Total Return and Income Fund, Inc. (the “Fund”) (NYSE:LGI) is confirming today, pursuant to its Managed Distribution Policy, as previously authorized by its Board of Directors, a monthly distribution of $0.15340 per share on the Fund’s outstanding common stock. The distribution is payable on September 22, 2026, to shareholders of record on September 10, 2026. The ex-dividend date is September 10, 2026.

The Fund will pay a previously declared distribution today, August 21, 2026. The following table sets forth the estimated amounts of the current distribution and the cumulative distributions paid, including today’s distribution, from the following sources: net investment income, net realized capital gains (short-term and long-term), and return of capital. All amounts are expressed per share of common stock and are based on accounting principles generally accepted in the US, which may differ from federal income tax regulations.

You should not draw any conclusions about the Fund’s investment performance from the amount of this distribution or from the terms of the Fund’s Managed Distribution Policy.

The Fund estimates that it has distributed more than its net investment income and net realized capital gains; therefore, a portion of your distribution may be return of capital. A return of capital may occur, for example, when some or all of the money that you invested in the Fund is paid back to you. A return of capital distribution does not necessarily reflect the Fund’s investment performance and should not be confused with “yield” or “income”.

The amounts and sources of distributions reported above are only estimates and are not being provided for tax reporting purposes. The actual amounts and sources of the amounts for tax reporting purposes will depend upon the Fund’s investment experience during the remainder of its fiscal year and may be subject to changes based on tax regulations. The Fund provides financial intermediary firms the information necessary to produce the Form 1099-DIV, and then the relevant financial intermediary firm will send you a Form 1099-DIV for the calendar year that will tell you how to report these distributions for federal income tax purposes. If you have any questions, or need additional information, please call us at 1-800-823-6300.

Portfolio data as of July 31, 2026, including performance, asset allocation, top 10 holdings, sector weightings, regional exposure, and other Fund characteristics have been posted on Lazard Asset Management’s (“LAM”) website, www.LazardAssetManagement.com.

The Fund’s investment objective is total return, consisting of capital appreciation and current income. The Fund’s net assets are invested in a portfolio of approximately 60 to 80 US and non-US equity securities, including American Depository Receipts, generally of companies with market capitalizations greater than $2 billion, and may include investments in emerging markets. The Fund also invests in emerging market currencies (primarily by entry into forward currency contracts), or instruments whose value is derived from the performance of an underlying emerging market currency, and also may invest in debt obligations, including government, government agency and corporate obligations and structured notes denominated in emerging market currencies.

An indirect subsidiary of Lazard, Inc. (NYSE: LAZ), LAM, the Fund’s investment manager, offers a range of equity, fixed-income, and alternative investment products worldwide. As of July 31, 2026, LAM and affiliated asset management companies in the Lazard Group managed $286.9 billion worth of client assets. For more information about LAM, please go to www.LazardAssetManagement.com.

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SOURCE Lazard Global Total Return and Income Fund, Inc.