The New York Times drops freelance journalist who used AI to write book review; The Guardian, March 31, 2026

 Emma Loffhagen, The Guardian; The New York Times drops freelance journalist who used AI to write book review

"The New York Times has cut ties with a freelance journalist after discovering he used artificial intelligence to help write a book review that echoed elements of a review of the same book in the Guardian.

It came after a New York Times reader flagged similarities between the paper’s January review of Watching Over Her by Jean-Baptiste Andrea, written by author and journalist Alex Preston, and an August review of the same book written by Christobel Kent in the Guardian.

The New York Times launched an investigation, during which Preston admitted that he had used AI to assist writing the review and did not spot the sections that were pulled from the Guardian before submitting it. In a statement to the Guardian on Tuesday, Preston said that he was “hugely embarrassed” and had “made a serious mistake”."

The Copyright Act in the age of AI; Politico, April 6, 2026

 AARON MAK , Politico; The Copyright Act in the age of AI

"The Copyright Act is reaching a major milestone this year, yet some legal scholars aren’t sure how well it will hold up in the age of artificial intelligence.

Stanford University held a summit on Friday to celebrate (and fret about) the 1976 act, which is the foundation of modern copyright law, as the 50th anniversary of its signing approaches in October. Academics advanced a number of proposals to update and reinterpret American copyright law, though several also warned against stretching it too far. The consensus: AI will reshape copyright whether we like it or not, and that it’s time to grapple with the implications."

Iowa can restrict LGBTQ+ books and topics at schools, appellate court rules; Associated Press via The Guardian, April 6, 2026

Associated Press via The Guardian; Iowa can restrict LGBTQ+ books and topics at schools, appellate court rules

Ruling, vacating lower court’s temporary block, applies to classrooms and libraries up to sixth grade 

"Iowa can enforce a law that restricts teachers from talking about LGBTQ+ topics with students in kindergarten through the sixth grade and bans some books in libraries and classrooms, an appellate court said on Monday.

The decision for now vacates a lower court judge’s temporary blocks on the law.

The measure was first approved by Republican majorities in the Iowa house and senate and the Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, in 2023, which they said reinforced age-appropriate education in kindergarten through 12th grades. It has been a back-and-forth battle in the courts in the three years since lawsuits were filed by the Iowa State Education Association, major publishing houses and bestselling authors, as well as Iowa Safe Schools, an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization."

Barnes Wins 2027–2028 ALA Presidency; American Libraries, April 6, 2026

 American Libraries; Barnes Wins 2027–2028 ALA Presidency

"Tamika Barnes, associate dean of Perimeter College Library Services at Georgia State University in Atlanta, has been elected 2026–2027 president-elect of the American Library Association (ALA). The Association made the announcement April 6.

Barnes received 3,827 votes, while her opponent, Becky Calzada, district library coordinator at Leander (Tex.) Independent School District, received 2,742 votes...

In her candidate statement published in American Libraries in March, Barnes pledged that her presidency would focus on four pillars: unified advocacy; inclusive leadership and professional growth; equity, access, and intellectual freedom; and transparency and stewardship.

“I have seen firsthand how ALA’s values of equity, diversity, inclusion, intellectual freedom, and social responsibility are lived out every day by library workers across the country,” Barnes wrote. “These values have shaped my own leadership, which is collaborative, grounded in integrity, and centered on community impact.”

She will assume presidency of ALA at the conclusion of the 2027 ALA Annual Conference and Exhibition in New Orleans."

The Federal Government Is Rushing Toward AI. Our Reporting Offers Three Cautionary Tales.; ProPublica, April 6, 2026

Renee Dudley , ProPublica; The Federal Government Is Rushing Toward AI. Our Reporting Offers Three Cautionary Tales.

"This emerging technology has its grip on everyone: Home users, corporations and the federal government are all rushing to use it. President Donald Trump and his Cabinet say AI will transform the nation, making us more prosperous, efficient and secure — if only we can adopt it fast enough. 

But this messaging isn’t new. President Barack Obama’s administration used nearly identical language a decade and a half ago as the U.S. barreled into the technological revolution of cloud computing.

I’ve studied how the federal government has handled — and mishandled — this transition over the past two decades, and my reporting offers some cautionary tales and valuable lessons as policymakers encourage the use of AI and federal agencies adopt the technology."

‘Proactively fall in line’: Holocaust Memorial Museum quietly changed content after Trump returned to office; Politico, April 5, 2026

IRIE SENTNER, Politico ; ‘Proactively fall in line’: Holocaust Memorial Museum quietly changed content after Trump returned to office

Two former employees said they believed the museum was altering its content preemptively to avoid unwanted negative attention from the Trump administration.

"In the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington quietly removed from its website educational resources about American racism and canceled a workshop about the “fragility of democracy.”

The changes, which have not been previously reported, came as Trump cracked down on what he called “corrosive ideology” at the Smithsonian Institution, demanding a slew of alterations at the world’s largest museum network to more closely align its content with his worldview. They also coincided with the administration’s efforts to remove content related to diversity, equity and inclusion from federal websites...

The museum pulled from its website a page called “Teaching Materials on Nazism and Jim Crow” at some point after Aug. 29, 2025, the last time the page was captured on the Internet Archive. That page provided lesson plans and resources about the connections between American de jure racism and the Nazi regime, including links to sites about “African American Soldiers during World War II” and “Afro-Germans during the Holocaust,” among other topics.

It also linked to a 2018 video on the museum’s YouTube channel featuring a conversation between a Holocaust survivor and a woman whose father was lynched in Alabama. That video is now unlisted, meaning it does not show up on the USHMM’s YouTube page but is still accessible via direct URL.

Leaders at the museum also renamed a one-day civic education workshop designed for college students from “Fragility of Democracy and the Rise of the Nazis” to “Before the Holocaust: German Society and the Nazi Rise to Power.” In an email, obtained by POLITICO, between a senior staff member at the museum’s Levine Institute for Holocaust Education and a staffer planning the workshop, the senior staff member said the change was necessary due to “concerns regarding how the term fragility may be perceived or interpreted in the current climate.”"

US music publishers suing Anthropic make their case against AI 'fair use'; Reuters, March 24, 2026

Blake Brittain , Reuters; US music publishers suing Anthropic make their case against AI 'fair use'

"Music publishers Universal Music Group , Concord and ABKCO have asked a judge in California to rule that U.S. copyright law does not insulate artificial intelligence startup Anthropic from ​liability for copying their song lyrics to train its AI-powered chatbot Claude.

The publishers' request , filed on Monday ‌in federal court in San Jose, tees up a critical question in the legal battle between creators and tech companies: Does the doctrine of "fair use" apply to the copying of millions of copyrighted works to train AI models?"

Tickets on sale for grand opening of Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library; KFGO, April 1, 2026

Gretchen Hjelmstad, KFGO; Tickets on sale for grand opening of Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library

"You could be among the first to visit the new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library.

Tickets are now available for the library’s grand opening on July 4, which is also America’s 250th birthday.

The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library is located in Medora in the Badlands of western North Dakota, where the 26th president hunted and ranched as a young man in the 1880s.

Capacity is limited. You can reserve tickets here."

Teddy Roosevelt’s Family Urges G.O.P. to Protect Public Lands; The New York Times, February 16, 2026

Maxine Joselow, The New York Times; Teddy Roosevelt’s Family Urges G.O.P. to Protect Public Lands

In a rare letter to Republican senators, four descendants of the former president oppose mining near a wilderness area in Minnesota. 

"Off the top of his head, Mr. Roosevelt rattled off several conservation efforts by Republican presidents: Ulysses S. Grant established Yellowstone as the first national park. Abraham Lincoln protected Yosemite Valley by giving it to California as the first state park. And most recently, George W. Bush created a marine national monument in the Pacific Ocean southwest of Hawaii.

“I don’t see any Republican leadership on that scale today,” Mr. Roosevelt said.

President Trump, who has indicated that he will sign the measure to allow mining near the Boundary Waters, has sought to increase oil and gas drilling, mining and other industrial activities on public lands and waters across the country. His administration plans to permit new oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska and across nearly 1.3 billion acres of U.S. coastal waters.

“There’s never been a president with zero interest in protecting the natural world until Donald Trump,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University and the author of the book “The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America.”...

Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, frequently invokes Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation legacy in speeches, social media posts and emails to Interior Department employees.

While serving as the governor of North Dakota, Mr. Burgum also championed the construction of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, N.D. The library is set to open on July 4 to mark America’s 250th birthday, an occasion that the four Roosevelts highlighted in their letter.

“On Independence Day, three pillars of T.R.’s life will take central stage: leadership, conservation and citizenship,” they wrote. “It’s one thing for politicians to say they believe in these three pillars, and it’s quite another thing to act that way.”"

The Trump presidential library would be a giant tower of grift; The Washington Post, April 3, 2026

Philip Kennicott, The Washington Post; The Trump presidential library would be a giant tower of grift

 "But the unknown funding and revenue questions raised by this structure are deeply serious. By the time of the Obama administration, about 95 percent of the presidential records were digital, meaning they didn’t require huge amounts of storage space. So, what will fill those 50 floors of space?

Will they be monetized, as apartments or offices? And if so, who will profit from them?

Despite numerous efforts by Congress to establish ethics guidelines and bring transparency to the fundraising for presidential centers, these institutions are still allowed to seek unlimited private donations without disclosing their donors.

Will the Trump library be some kind of hybrid nonprofit foundation, built with gifts solicited from private donors including, perhaps, foreign governments — yet also a for-profit real estate development that enriches Trump personally?

The great modernist architect Le Corbusier once said that a house is a machine for living. Libraries and museums might be thought of as machines for learning. The Trump presidential center appears intended to be a machine for emoluments, with one of the biggest emoluments in the history of America sitting in a giant hall at its base."

SCOTUS Rules Conversion Therapy Ban Likely Unconstitutional; Psychology Today, April 4, 2026

Allan E. Barsky PhD, MSW, JD, Psychology Today; SCOTUS Rules Conversion Therapy Ban Likely Unconstitutional

Recent SCOTUS conversion therapy ruling gives rise to ethical and legal conflicts.

• "The Supreme Court suggests that state bans on conversion therapy might be unconstitutional.
• Regardless of whether state bans are constitutional, conversion therapy is harmful.
• Mental health professionals' ethical duties to clients include doing no harm.
• Even if conversion therapy is found to be legally permissible, it is unethical."

Brands Adopt ‘No AI’ Disclaimers to Stand Out Amid the Slop; Wall Street Journal, April 6, 2026

 Patrick Coffee, Wall Street Journal; Brands Adopt ‘No AI’ Disclaimers to Stand Out Amid the Slop

Marketers move to get ahead of growing consumer skepticism by labeling content that doesn’t use AI

"As the AI-generated imagery and video colloquially called slop spreads across social media and video feeds, marketers are going out of their way to tell consumers they’re not to blame.

For some, it’s part of a message about authenticity that they want to send to their customers.

“We commit: No AI generated bodies or people,” promised a campaign last month from Aerie, the intimate apparel brand owned by American Eagle Outfitters."

Contentious House USPTO Oversight Hearing Centers on PTAB Reforms, Trump’s Political Influence; IP Watchdog, March 25, 2026

 STEVE BRACHMANN, IP Watchdog; Contentious House USPTO Oversight Hearing Centers on PTAB Reforms, Trump’s Political Influence

"Today, the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet conducted its first oversight hearing of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) during the second Trump Administration. The harshest lines of questioning for USPTO Director John Squires during the hearing were reserved for the agency’s notice of proposed rulemaking(NPRM) to reform rules of practice at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) as well as President Trump’s political influence at the agency. During the hearing, Squires also confirmed that the agency’s Patent Public Advisory Committee (PPAC) would soon be revived, following an offer to join PPAC extended last night to an undisclosed independent inventor...

The full House Judiciary Committee’s Ranking Member, Jamie Raskin (D-MD), also hammered Director Squires on President Trump’s influence, raising questions throughout the hearing about the USPTO’s role in filing two trademark applications for “Board of Peace” on behalf of President Trump...

Rep. Zoe Lofgren’s (D-CA) concerns over Squires’ PTAB reforms involved not just the centralization of decision-making authority over IPR proceedings but the lack of explanation for decisions to not institute or de-institute stemming from what Lofgren called “barebones summary denials.” Squires responded that PTAB judges work from a record of more than 600 written decisions, and that controversial reforms like settled expectations have cut both ways in favor of patent owners and challengers. However, Lofgren commented that the 64% of IPRs discretionarily denied under Director Squires was due to the adoption of discretionary considerations and a centralized Director review process acting as barriers that Congress never envisioned."

Anthropic Suddenly Cares Intensely About Intellectual Property After Realizing With Horror That It Accidentally Leaked Claude’s Source Code; Futurism, April 3, 2026

  Frank Landymore, Futurism; Anthropic Suddenly Cares Intensely About Intellectual Property After Realizing With Horror That It Accidentally Leaked Claude’s Source Code

"The AI industry largely acts as if it’s above lowly copyright laws — unless, of course, those laws happen to be protecting its own interests.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, Anthropic is scrambling to contain a leak of its Claude Code AI model’s source code by issuing a copyright takedown request for more than 8,000 copies of it — a gallingly ironic stance for the company to be taking, considering how it trained its models in the first place.

The leak isn’t considered to be an outright disaster; no customer data was exposed, Anthropic says, nor were the internal mathematical “weights” that determine how the AI “learns” and which distinguish it from other models. But it did expose the techniques its engineers used to get its AI model to act as an autonomous agent, a form of digital infrastructure coders call a harness, and other tricks for making the AI operate as seamlessly as it does.

Hence Anthropic’s copyright takedown request, which targets the thousands of copies that were shared on GitHub. It later narrowed its request from 8,000 copies to 96 copies, according to the WSJ reporting, claiming that the initial one covered more accounts than intended.

It’s certainly within Anthropic’s right to issue the takedown request, but the hypocrisy of Anthropic running to the law to protect its intellectual property is plain to see, especially for a company that’s relentlessly positioned itself as the ethical adult in the room."

Ousted Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George says U.S. soldiers deserve "courageous leaders of character" in outgoing email; CBS News, April 4, 2026

 Lucia I Suarez Sang, CBS News; Ousted Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George says U.S. soldiers deserve "courageous leaders of character" in outgoing email

"Ousted Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Randy George, told Pentagon officials in an outgoing email that U.S. soldiers deserve "courageous leaders of character," after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asked him to step down and take immediate retirement.

CBS News exclusively reported earlier this week on the general's ousting, with one source saying Hegseth wants someone in the role who will implement his and President Trump's vision for the Army.

An outgoing email, attributed to George and confirmed as authentic by CBS News on Saturday, circulated online after his ousting. A U.S. official told CBS News that George sent the email to Driscoll, the undersecretary and assistant secretary of the Army, as well as to the three- and four-star generals and officers on his staff.

"It has been the greatest privilege to serve beside you and lead Soldiers in support of our country," he wrote. "I know you'll all continue to stay laser-focused on the mission, continue innovating, and relentlessly cut through the bureaucracy to get our warfighters what they need to win on the modern battlefield."

He added: "Our soldiers are truly the best in the world – they deserve tough training and courageous leaders of character. I have no doubt you will all continue to lead with courage, character, and grit.""

‘I always considered social media evil’: big tobacco whistleblower on tech’s addictive products; The Guardian, April 5, 2026

Sanya Manor, The Guardian ; ‘I always considered social media evil’: big tobacco whistleblower on tech’s addictive products

"A key whistleblower in the tobacco industry’s landmark trials of the 1990s has been watching big tech’s recent court battles closely. Jeffrey Stephen Wigand, a biochemist who helped reveal how tobacco companies targeted children and hid just how addictive cigarettes were, has been struck with a feeling of familiarity. Last week’s verdict in a major social media trial that Meta and YouTube deliberately designed addictive products has only strengthened comparisons to the legal crackdown on big tobacco. Wigand sees it, too. His first thought, as he learned about the litigation in California, was that social media companies, through their advertisements, were trying to addict children – much like the tobacco industry did."

Pope Leo XIV celebrates first Easter vigil, calls for harmony and peace in a world torn by war; Associated Press via Politico, April 4, 2026

Associated Press via Politico; Pope Leo XIV celebrates first Easter vigil, calls for harmony and peace in a world torn by war

"Pope Leo XIV, carrying a tall, lit candle through a darkened and silent St. Peter’s Basilica, ushered in Christianity’s most joyous celebration with his first Easter vigil service as pontiff Saturday night, urging that Easter would bring harmony and peace to a world torn by wars."

Claude's Constitution; Anthropic, January 21, 2026

Anthropic, Claude's Constitution

Our vision for Claude's character

"Claude’s constitution is a detailed description of Anthropic’s intentions for Claude’s values and behavior. It plays a crucial role in our training process, and its content directly shapes Claude’s behavior. It’s also the final authority on our vision for Claude, and our aim is for all of our other guidance and training to be consistent with it.

Training models is a difficult task, and Claude’s behavior might not always reflect the constitution’s ideals. We will be open—for example, in our system cards—about the ways in which Claude’s behavior comes apart from our intentions. But we think transparency about those intentions is important regardless.

The document is written with Claude as its primary audience, so it might read differently than you’d expect. For example, it’s optimized for precision over accessibility, and it covers various topics that may be of less interest to human readers. We also discuss Claude in terms normally reserved for humans (e.g., “virtue,” “wisdom”). We do this because we expect Claude’s reasoning to draw on human concepts by default, given the role of human text in Claude’s training; and we think encouraging Claude to embrace certain human-like qualities may be actively desirable.

This constitution is written for our mainline, general-access Claude models. We have some models built for specialized uses that don’t fully fit this constitution; as we continue to develop products for specialized use cases, we will continue to evaluate how to best ensure our models meet the core objectives outlined in this constitution.

For a summary of the constitution, and for more discussion of how we’re thinking about it, see our blog post “Claude’s new constitution.”

Powerful AI models will be a new kind of force in the world, and people creating them have a chance to help them embody the best in humanity. We hope this constitution is a step in that direction.

We’re releasing Claude’s constitution in full under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Deed, meaning it can be freely used by anyone for any purpose without asking for permission.

Many people at Anthropic and beyond contributed to the creation of this document, as did several Claude models. Amanda Askell is the primary author and wrote the majority of the text. Joe Carlsmith wrote significant parts of many sections and played a core role in revising the text. Chris Olah, Jared Kaplan, and Holden Karnofsky made significant contributions to its content and development. More detailed contribution statement and acknowledgments below.

The preface and the acknowledgements are not part of the official constitution."

The Catholic Priest Who Helped Write Anthropic’s A.I. Ethics Code; Observer, March 31, 2026

Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly , Observer; The Catholic Priest Who Helped Write Anthropic’s A.I. Ethics Code

"Father Brendan McGuire is writing a novel about a disenchanted monk and his A.I. companion. He’s doing it with Claude. That detail—a Catholic priest using Anthropic’s chatbot to explore questions of faith and artificial consciousness—tells you something about where Silicon Valley’s moral reckoning has arrived. McGuire, 60, leads St. Simon Catholic Parish in Los Altos, Calif., a congregation that counts some of the Valley’s A.I. researchers among its members. Earlier this year, he and a group of faith leaders helped Anthropic shape the Claude Constitution, the set of guiding principles governing how its A.I. behaves.

He is not, in other words, an outside critic. He is something more complicated: a true believer in both God and technology, trying to hold them in the same hand. “I left the tech industry, but it never really left me,” McGuire told Observer...

McGuire wasn’t Anthropic’s only religious collaborator. Bishop Paul Tighe of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education and Brian Patrick Green, a technology ethics director at Santa Clara University, also reviewed the Claude Constitution. Green and other Catholic scholars recently filed a federal court brief supporting Anthropic in its lawsuit against the U.S. government, which challenges the company’s effective blacklisting by the Pentagon after it refused to allow its A.I. systems to be used for autonomous warfare or domestic surveillance. The brief praised those ethical limits as “minimal standards of ethical conduct for technical progress.”...

Anthropic says its engagement with religious voices—part of a broader effort to engage a wide variety of communities to keep pace with technological acceleration—is only a beginning. The company plans to expand outreach beyond Catholic institutions to other religious leaders going forward."

What Teens Are Doing With Those Role-Playing Chatbots; The New York Times, April 4, 2026

Kashmir Hill

Photographs by Frances F. Denny

, The New York Times ; What Teens Are Doing With Those Role-Playing Chatbots

"There are a growing number of companies offering social chatbots that can act like friends, enemies, lovers, adventurous companions, or the manifestation of a fictional or real person you’ve always wanted to meet. You can pick A.I. Elon Musk’s brain or spar with A.I. Draco Malfoy. The myriad characters, often created by fellow users, offer drama, romance, therapy and LOLs.

Apps that feature role-playing chatbots are used by tens of millions of people, with engagement times that rival or surpass those of social media behemoths such as TikTok, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. The majority of teens surveyed by Pew use A.I. chatbots, with one out of 11 saying they had used Character.AI.

“If you think your child is not talking to chatbot companions, you’re probably wrong,” said Mitch Prinstein, co-director of the Winston Center on Technology and Brain Development at U.N.C. Chapel Hill.

Chatbots are surging in popularity as society is still grappling with how social media has affected young people; a wave of lawsuits is moving through the courts seeking damages from companies that plaintiffs say have deliberately created addictive products. (A jury in California recently found that Meta and YouTube were liable for $6 million in damages to one young woman.) And now parents and caregivers have a new attention-absorbing technology to reckon with.

At the beginning of last year, a high school teacher in Chicago told me that some of her students were dating chatbots, and she worried that they were having their first erotic experiences with them. I wanted to find out what teens had to say about that, so I joined communities devoted to social chatbot apps on the online messaging forum Discord. I introduced myself as a reporter and “an old,” and explained that I was interested in talking to young people who used the services regularly."

Trump’s Easter Message Isn’t Just Wrong—It’s Blasphemous; The Daily Beast, April 4, 2026

Michael Daly , The Daily Beast; Trump’s Easter Message Isn’t Just Wrong—It’s Blasphemous

"On hearing that President Donald Trump was compared to Jesus Christ at a White House Easter luncheon, a New York priest beloved by everybody from firefighters to refugees, from construction workers to the homeless, had much the same reaction as any true Christian.

“Donald Trump is no more Jesus Christ than I am an astronaut on Pluto,” Father Brian Jordan said from Midtown Manhattan, where he serves as pastor of The Church of St. Francis of Assisi.

Jordan also voiced his opinion on the people who stood with Trump in the East Room on Wednesday, nodding in assent as televangelist Paula White-Cain, the head of the White House Department of Faith and the president’s so-called “spiritual adviser,” made the sacrilegious comparison.

“What we call them is the champions of clever sophistry; they say they’re Christians in word, but their actions do not prove it,” Jordan said. “They don’t care about the poor, immigrants, the disabled, or people with gender orientation issues or any of that. They’re insensitive to their needs.”

He went on, “Jesus would reach out and try to bring peace, not war, to Iran. And bring peace, not war, in Ukraine. And try to help out the hungry and malnourished in South Sudan and other parts of the world that have hunger issues.”

Jordan, 70, matches his words with deeds at his church on West 31st Street, where the entrance is flanked by the flags of the FDNY and NYPD. Back in 2001, Jordan anointed the dead at Ground Zero and held regular masses amid the toxic ruins during the long recovery effort. He founded the Workers’ Chapel at St. Francis, where once a year he dons a hard hat and says a memorial mass for construction workers who died on the job. He also established an Immigration Center and does all he can for those who fled poverty and oppression."

Forest Service Will Close Research Stations That Study Wildfire Risk; The New York Times, April 3, 2026

 Eric Niiler, The New York Times; Forest Service Will Close Research Stations That Study Wildfire Risk

Scientists say their work on fires and climate change could be lost as the agency moves its headquarters to Utah from Washington and shuts 57 research stations.

"The U.S. Forest Service is closing 57 of its 77 research facilities in 31 states under a reorganization plan announced this week, threatening science that looked at how wildfires, drought, pests and global warming are putting pressure on forests.

The agency plans to consolidate its research division into a centralized office in Fort Collins, Colo., and move field researchers to locations in nearby states. But employees said they feared the move would lead many scientists to leave instead. The reorganization will also move the agency’s headquarters to Salt Lake City from Washington, affecting 260 employees.

Many of the research facilities are at universities where Forest Service scientists have access to laboratories and computers or at experimental forests where scientists can monitor the effects of environmental changes over long periods of time. They also investigate logging techniques, endangered plant and animal species, and how forests grow back after devastating fires.

The agency is closing six research and development facilities in California, five in Mississippi, four in Michigan and three in Utah, among others...

The Forest Service oversees 193 million acres of forest and grasslands in 43 states and territories, including forests managed for commercial logging and pristine wilderness areas. The agency lost 5,860 of its 35,550 employees during the first half of 2025 to cuts by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and early retirement programs, according to an inspector general’s report issued in December...

Mr. Trump has long denied the science and effects of climate change, and his administration has cut funding for climate-related research across the federal government. Conservation groups say that eliminating climate-related science will result in forests that are less healthy, and less resilient to future environmental changes, which also means fewer trees for the wood products industry."

Small Kansas town gets its first library after mysterious donation; CBS, April 4, 2026

[Video] CBS; Small Kansas town gets its first library after mysterious donation

"Frontenac, Kansas, is a community of 3,000 residents. When its city administrator received a mysterious $4.6 million dolllar donation from a couple whose dying wish was for a library to be built, the town sprung into action to solidify its legacy."

A folk musician became a target for AI fakes and a copyright troll; The Verge, April 4, 2026

 Terrence O'Brien, The Verge; A folk musician became a target for AI fakes and a copyright troll

"The worlds of generative AI, music distribution, and copyright are complex with multiple points of failure and opportunities for abuse."

Napa Valley Schools Emphasize Honesty, Ethics in AI Policy; GovTech, April 2, 2026

 Atmika Iyer, The Modesto Bee, Calif. via GovTech; Napa Valley Schools Emphasize Honesty, Ethics in AI Policy

"10 principles for AI use in Napa schools

1. Teaching and learning: AI should be used to personalize and enhance the learning experience for each student and to support digital citizenship and literacy.

2. Staff usage: AI should be used as a tool to augment and support, rather than replace, staff in the performance of their duties and responsibilities.

3. Ethical use and transparency: AI should be used ethically and transparently by all staff and students, with careful consideration of potential biases, and in compliance with all applicable intellectual property and copyright laws.

4. Accountability and responsibility: AI should be used in a manner that ensures accountability by those who use it and that those who use it are responsible for such use, including when and how it is used.

5. Academic honesty: The district should allow artificial intelligence tools to be used only in ways that support learning — such as research, skill development, or teacher-approved assistance — and prohibit any use that replaces a student’s original thinking or results in cheating, plagiarism or other acts of academic dishonesty.

6. Equity and access: AI should be implemented in a manner that ensures equitable access and opportunity for all students, regardless of background or ability, and for all schools across the district.

7. Secure and private: The district should prioritize security and privacy when changing existing practices or adopting new practices regarding AI.

8. Professional development: The district should provide ongoing professional development for staff, with a particular focus on the ethical and responsible use of AI.

9. Community engagement: The district should engage with the community to share these principles, to educate the community on AI, and to discuss the permitted and prohibited uses of AI in the district.

10. Continuous improvement: The district should regularly evaluate the use of AI by students and staff, and adapt its policies, procedures and professional development to align with best practices and evolving technologies. The district reserves the right to remove access to previously approved AI platforms.

(Source: Napa Valley Unified School District’s Board Policy Manual)

In a bid to develop a set of guidelines for responsible use of technology, the district convened an AI council of 30 stakeholders including parents, teachers, students and staff in May 2025. The council met five times to review CSBA’s policy and make a recommendation to the board.

In addition, the council developed guidelines for AI use for all stakeholders. These will be shared in the 2026-2027 school year. Amid rapid technological developments, the district plans to update them regularly."