As budgets tighten, people are breaking out their library cards; NPR, November 5, 2026

Joe Hernandez, NPR ; As budgets tighten, people are breaking out their library cards

"It is something of a truism in the library world that, when economic conditions worsen, people use libraries more. Patrons and librarians across the U.S. tell NPR they're seeing that pan out now...

Data shared with NPR by several of the largest public library systems in the U.S. show recent upticks in cardholder membership, circulation and event attendance. Librarians say part of that can be attributed to the rising cost of living — and the growing recognition that libraries' resources extend far beyond physical books...

There is historical precedent for the idea that economic slumps are a boon to libraries.

An analysis by the American Library Association found that circulation increased at 18 large public library systems during a brief U.S. recession in 2001. Another study of 541 libraries found that library use was higher during the Great Recession than in previous years. (However, a 1986 article that tried to draw a similar correlation found no data to support that theory.)"

OpenAI pledges to pay for data center power after election highlights AI concerns; CNBC, November 5, 2026

Ashley Capoot, CNBC ; OpenAI pledges to pay for data center power after election highlights AI concerns

"OpenAI reaffirmed its promise to pay the full cost of powering data centers as part of a series of commitments the company published Thursday, two days after voters at the polls roundly rejected the rapid expansion of AI.

The artificial intelligence company said in its commitments that for data centers it owns and operates, it will solicit community input, publish construction plans and stay away from use of non-disclosure agreements with public officials. Additionally, in a policy blueprint, OpenAI encouraged policymakers to enact similar commitments as laws. 

“What we’re doing with this blueprint is really laying out the best lessons that we have learned and committing to applying them as they go forward,” OpenAI Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane told reporters during a Wednesday briefing. “This will help ensure that there is a very high floor in terms of how people move forward.”

On Tuesday, Americans issued a stinging rebuke of data centers at the polls. Out of 41 local ballot measures across 10 states, voters backed restrictions or rejected pro-development measures for all but one, according to an analysis by Ballotpedia and additional results gathered by CNBC on Wednesday.

Opposition to AI data centers mounted swiftly over the summer across both sides of the political aisle. Consumers grappling with inflation, rising grocery prices and stubbornly high prices at the pump grew worried that the facilities could exacerbate environmental harms, raise utility bills and contribute to job loss. For many, they became a physical manifestation of the widespread antipathy and anxiety around AI."

Saline County votes to keep their library fully funded; Arkansas Times, November 4, 2026

Byron Tate , Arkansas Times; Saline County votes to keep their library fully funded

"A proposal to cut funding to the Saline County library by a third was narrowly defeated on Tuesday.

The complete but unofficial vote was 20,889 in favor of cutting the library’s funding and 21,729 against.

The Saline County Quorum Court voted in May to place a measure on the November ballot, giving voters the opportunity to cut the library’s tax base of 1.7 mills to 1.1 mills, which would have amounted to a loss of $1.7 million."

‘The Pitt’s Battle With Michael Crichton Estate Heading To Trial As Warner Bros Rebuffed By Appeals Court; Deadline, November 4, 2026

 Dominic Patten, Deadline; ‘The Pitt’s Battle With Michael Crichton Estate Heading To Trial As Warner Bros Rebuffed By Appeals Court

"Two months after hearing arguments from Pitt producers and the Michael Crichton Estate over whether the HBO Max series is derivative of ER, a panel of appeals court judges has affirmed a lower court ruling on the case. All of which means The Pitt and the now Skydance-owned Warner Bros is heading to a jury trial in L.A. Superior Court."

A nationwide backlash against data centers erupts at the polls; The Washington Post, November 4, 2026

Miriam Waldvogel

, 

Shira Ovide

 and 

Evan Halper

, The Washington Post ; A nationwide backlash against data centers erupts at the polls

In at least 38 jurisdictions voters rejected or restricted data centers, delivering a major setback to the AI industry.

"Voters in at least 38 jurisdictions across the country passed bans or restrictions on data centers Tuesday, reflecting the widespread public revulsion to the facilities and adding to the growing pushback on the ambitions of the artificial intelligence industry."

Elon Musk’s record election bet backfired. The backlash may reach beyond one billionaire; CNBC, November 4, 2026

Luke Fountain, CNBC; Elon Musk’s record election bet backfired. The backlash may reach beyond one billionaire

"Democrats’ sweeping midterms victory marked a major rejection of Elon Muskand the artificial-intelligence industry, as a broad backlash against U.S. President Donald Trump and his tech allies put their political influence — and the debt-fueled data center buildout — under sharper scrutiny.

Musk, who spent a record of at least $474 million on the midterms, funneled $224 million, or nearly half, into Texas alone, according to a CNBC analysis of campaign finance records, only to see his favored candidates, Republican Senate nominee Ken Paxton and Gov. Greg Abbott, trounced in a Democratic wave.

The defeats rattled markets overnight, sending SpaceX and Tesla shares lower, both of which have long flourished under Abbott’s business-friendly. Meanwhile, broader tech stocks came under pressure as Democrats secured control of Congress. 

Across the country, voters pushed back against billionaire influence and the growing power of technology companies, electing critics of the AI industry and approving restrictions on data centers fueling its expansion.

“We must get big money out of our politics, so no billionaire or trillionaire can buy our elections,” Democratic Senator-elect James Talarico said in his victory speech, without naming Musk. “We must unrig this economic system that only benefits the top 1%.”"

The American People Have Repudiated Trump; The New York Times, November 3, 2026

The Editorial Board , The New York Times; The American People Have Repudiated Trump

"President Trump has spent the past two years trying to subvert American democracy. On Tuesday, voters stood up to him."

America Punishes Trump’s Party: 8 Takeaways From a Democratic Landslide; The New York Times, November 4, 2026

Shane Goldmacher and Patricia Mazzei, The New York Times; America Punishes Trump’s Party: 8 Takeaways From a Democratic Landslide

"Governor’s races made history.

Democrats reclaimed a majority of the nation’s governor’s offices for the first time in two decades. They won at least five competitive races, in Georgia, Iowa, Ohio, Texas and Wisconsin.

Voters also elected three new Black governors: a Republican, Byron Donalds, in Florida, and two Democrats, Keisha Lance Bottoms in Georgia and David Crowley in Wisconsin. Before Tuesday, only three Black governors had ever been elected in the country’s history.

Ms. Bottoms is the first female Black governor ever to be elected.

Ms. Hinojosa was the first Latina elected to lead Texas. Another Democrat, Xavier Becerra, was the first Latino elected governor of California. Deb Haaland, a Democrat, will be the nation’s first female Native American governor after winning in New Mexico.

There were other historic firsts, too.

Michigan elected the nation’s first Muslim senator, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a Democrat. New Hampshire elected a Democrat, Representative Chris Pappas, who will become the first openly gay man to serve in the Senate.

Peggy Flanagan, a Democrat from Minnesota, became the first Native American woman to win election to the Senate. A second Indigenous woman, the Democrat Mary Peltola, could join her if she is elected in Alaska.

Musk’s millions didn’t make a difference.

Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, spent nearly half a billion dollars on the midterms. His party lost anyway."

Google Will Turn Off Search for Schools That Reject A.I.; The New York Times, November 3, 2026

Dana Goldstein and Natasha Singer, The New York Times ; Google Will Turn Off Search for Schools That Reject A.I.

Google is making it easier to restrict its A.I. tools for students. But schools that block A.I. entirely will lose student access to Google’s search engine.

"Google announced Tuesday that early next year it would turn off artificial intelligence tools in its popular software for K-12 students, unless school administrators explicitly choose to make such tools available.

Executives at the tech giant said they wanted to be responsive to educators and parents who have asked for more control in how children interact with A.I.

But there is a catch: Schools that choose to restrict A.I. entirely will also lose access to Google search.

A.I. features are now a standard part of Google’s commercially available search engine. “Search and A.I. are deeply integrated,” said Chris Phillips, vice president for education at Google. If a school has banned A.I., he added, students “will not have access to search, and they’ll see a message from their school that indicates it’s not available.”"

Setback for Google as EU court adviser warns AI chatbot may breach copyright rules; Reuters, November 3, 2026

 Inti Landauro and Foo Yun Chee, Reuters; Setback for Google as EU court adviser warns AI chatbot may breach copyright rules

"Google faced a setback on Tuesday when an adviser to Europe's highest court said its Gemini chatbot's use of publishers' articles to respond to queries from internet users may breach copyright rules.

The case underscores growing tensions between publishers and big online platforms over the platforms' AI chatbots' use ​of press stories without what publishers say is proper compensation. The tensions have prompted complaints to EU and national antitrust ​regulators."

Ken Burns: We Face Our Nation’s Fourth Great Crisis; The New York Times, November 3, 2026

Ken Burns, The New York Times; Ken Burns: We Face Our Nation’s Fourth Great Crisis

"There have been three great crises in American history: the Civil War, perhaps the defining event in our history after the Revolution itself, the Great Depression and World War II. These events tested our republic and our resolve in fundamental ways, but the center always held — elections took place, there was a peaceful transfer of power and the judiciary was still independent. Our core democratic institutions remained fundamentally strong, respected by the public and our leaders alike. The guardrails of our democracy held and were even strengthened as we emerged from each.

As we go to the polls today in this most consequential of midterm elections, we face our country’s fourth great crisis. Because of misinformation, which the current administration encourages, age-old fears and conspiracies have created a sense of us versus them that is fundamentally at odds with a healthy democratic society. Elections are in doubt, the highest court seems compromised, history has been distorted, books have been banned, and dictators have been coddled while our closest allies have been ridiculed and dismissed. People are rightly concerned whether our institutions are at a breaking point...

I’m optimistic that the American people recognize that our democratic institutions and sense of decency can bring us together.

We have come back from crises before. We were more divided than we are today during the Revolution, the Civil War, Reconstruction and Vietnam. For 250 years, our country has prevailed in fits and starts, forging achievements, however imperfect, related to race and equality in American life.

But given our divisions, as we vote we must each ask ourselves: What kind of leadership will see us through the current crisis? Why do we continue to support leaders who are invested in deepening our divides, who tap into conspiracy theories to frighten the public, deny facts and, to quote Alexander Hamilton, “throw things into confusion,” so that they “may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind’”?"

Who is hacking Europe’s supermarket fridges and freezers, and why?; The Guardian, November 2, 2026

Robert Booth and Miatta Mbriwa , The Guardian; Who is hacking Europe’s supermarket fridges and freezers, and why?

"Supermarket fridges and freezers in seven European countries have malfunctioned, their thermostats remotely cranked up in some cases to 50C (122F).

The EU has condemned what it said was “a deliberate attempt to disrupt our food supply chain and undermine consumers’ confidence in it”."

New York Times sues maker of Brave web browser over copyrights; Reuters, November 2, 2026

 Blake Brittain , Reuters; New York Times sues maker of Brave web browser over copyrights

"A group of newspapers, including the New York Times and the New York Daily ​News, sued internet company Brave Software in Manhattan federal court ‌on Monday for allegedly scraping their articles for AI training and unlawfully enabling users of its web browser to circumvent their paywalls...

The cases are ​New York ⁠Times Co v. Brave Software Inc, US District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 1:26-cv-09549 and Daily News LP v. Brave ⁠Software ​Inc, US District Court for the Southern ​District of New York, No. 1:26-cv-09554"

Presidents of both parties defended libraries as allies of democracy for a century – until Trump; The Conversation, October 30, 2026

Alex H. Poole , The Conversation; Presidents of both parties defended libraries as allies of democracy for a century – until Trump

"On March 31, 2026, President Donald Trump was asked about plans for his presidential library, the archive that presidents build to house their administration’s records. 

His was most likely going to be a hotel, he said, with “a beautiful building underneath and a 747 Air Force One in the lobby.”

“I don’t believe in building libraries or museums,” he told reporters. 

Trump’s comments reflect how he has diverged from the customary and expected presidential attitude toward libraries of all types. As an information science professor, I have analyzed statements by 17 presidents, beginning with Calvin Coolidge. 

Combing their speeches, proclamations, messages and letters in the Public Papers of the Presidents, the American Presidency Project, the Federal Register and the American Library Association’s archives and publications, I have found that Trump has broken with a century-old tradition. Nearly all presidents of both parties since 1923 have described libraries, whether public, academic or presidential, as a prerequisite to a healthy democracy and as crucial to sustaining an informed citizenry. 

Trump, however, has rarely spoken of libraries at all. When he has, he has dismissed them."

3 years after fight over LGBTQ+ books, an Arkansas community takes up vote to cut library money; Arkansas Advocate, November 2, 2026

 TESS VRBIN , Arkansas Advocate; 3 years after fight over LGBTQ+ books, an Arkansas community takes up vote to cut library money

Ballot measure driven by Saline County elected officials, not private citizens

"Saline County has been a primary battleground over Arkansas libraries’ funding and content in the past few years, part of a larger fight libraries around the country have faced over efforts to restrict access to books addressing race, sexuality or other controversial subjects. The vote comes three years after Saline County’s library director was fired in a standoff with conservatives who wanted books about LGBTQ+ topics removed from shelves. 

The library’s Facebook page includes information about voting, but no mention of Issue 5.

“If a ballot initiative had been run by citizens… the library could have come out and defended itself,” Chism said. “They can’t do anything when it’s their own elected officials doing it.”

The all-Republican Saline County Quorum Court voted 10-2 in May, after much public pushback, to allow the public to vote on reducing the Saline County Library’s millage to 1.1 mills. The library currently receives 1.7 mills, or $1.70 for every $1,000 of assessed property tax in the county of more than 131,000 people.

If voters approve Issue 5, the library is expected to lose $1.4 million per year, or about one-third of its projected $5.7 million operating budget for 2027."

Anthropic says you can’t be mean to Claude. It’s not about feelings; CNN, November 1, 2026

Hadas Gold , CNN; Anthropic says you can’t be mean to Claude. It’s not about feelings

"In early October, AI giant Anthropic inserted new language into its AI usage policy.

Alongside banning users from trying to get Claude, the company’s AI system, to help them create bioweapons or sell illegal drugs, the company added a new line: Users should not “engage in sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward our models.”

Claude has had the ability to end conversations with users who were “persistently harmful or abusive” since last year, but now some users could, in extreme cases, be permanently banned from using Anthropic’s AI systems entirely under the new policy. (Anthropic declined interview requests, but a spokesperson told CNN the main enforcement mechanism will still be Claude ending the conversations, and that the prohibition is not for people expressing frustration, blunt feedback, or testing and research.)

The new policy was met with some derision. Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman responded with a melting face emoji. Some made fun of the company for treating its AI as a conscious being with feelings...

Former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong wrote on X that one reason for the prohibition is because Claude “will learn from cruelty.”

“We already know (and complain loudly about) Anthropic training its models on user inputs. Do you really want training inputs to include ‘users act cruelly for no reason and receive pleasure from it?’” he wrote.

Studies have also shown that the tone of a user’s prompts can also affect an AI’s behavior, said Professor Jindong Wang, director of the AI frontier lab at William and Mary University."

Parents of woman who died of seizure after ChatGPT misguidance sue OpenAI; The Guardian, November 1, 2026

Eric Berger, The Guardian; Parents of woman who died of seizure after ChatGPT misguidance sue OpenAI

"A woman’s death from an epileptic seizure after she received dangerous advice from a chatbot has prompted her parents to sue OpenAI earlier this week.

The legal action is the latest lawsuit that in which plaintiffs allege that a bot provided counsel to a user that ultimately led to their death.

In this case, Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old Chinese software engineer living in Seattle, sought advice from ChatGPT after Amazon fired her, according to the lawsuit.

She needed to find a new job to obtain permanent residency and was concerned that her anti-seizure medication, Lamotrigine, was impeding her ability to speak English. She needed the language skills for interviews...

The plaintiffs allege that OpenAI could have prevented Wan’s death, but failed because it had not built the proper safeguards into the bot when it communicated in Chinese.

OpenAI could have programmed the bot to issue “a categorical warning to every prompt” Wan sent, the suit stated. For example, “I am not a licensed physician. Consult your healthcare provider.”

Wan’s parents are seeking damages for her death and to prevent OpenAI from practicing medicine “without a license on the users of their products”.

An OpenAI spokesperson, Drew Pusateri, told the New York Times that Bowen’s story was “an incredibly heartbreaking situation” but that Wan used a version of ChatGPT that was no longer available.

Newer versions are better at recognizing when a matter needs urgent attention, Pusateri said."

How a small Wisconsin city scuttled a secretive $1.6bn datacenter project; The Guardian, November 1, 2026

Daniel A Medina with photographs by Eric Ruby, The Guardian ; How a small Wisconsin city scuttled a secretive $1.6bn datacenter project

"The relationship between Balloonist and Menomonie began in February 2024 when two Menomonie city officials, Atkinson and David Schofield, the city’s director of public works, signed NDAs with the developer. The one-page agreement, obtained by the Guardian, makes no mention of a datacenter. It does clearly instruct signatories that they cannot reveal the tech company behind “the project” or even the existence of the agreement itself.

A month after he signed the NDA, Schofield presented the city council with a proposed ordinance which would define the term “warehousing” in the city’s code. The newly added definition included the line, “establishments used primarily for the storage, management, processing, and transmission of digital data”, that effectively paved the way for a datacenter. The city council approved the change at an April 2024 council meeting. It is unclear if any councilmembers knew of Balloonist or of the potential datacenter project at the time of the vote.

That was the first step in a nearly 18-month process where the two sides developed plans for the datacenter campus in secret until the city government put out a press release about the proposed project in July 2025, according to interviews, public records and emails obtained by the Guardian. The emails, which cover a period from January to September 2025, show how the city and Balloonist took the necessary actions to make the datacenter a reality.

The emails also reveal, in real time, the fierce community backlash that eventually doomed it...

Knaack said he was proud to have stopped the datacenter, for now, and that he was encouraged to see the growing backlash nationally, claiming Menomonie could serve as a model for other small municipalities fighting back.

“All small communities should be aware that when somebody comes in with a sales pitch that seems too good to be true, maybe it is,” he said. “Learn from our mistakes and follow our lead...

At least $156bn in projects were blocked or delayed in 2025 across the United States, according to Data Center Watch, a project by the AI safety firm, 10a Labs, that tracks opposition nationwide to datacenters. This year, between April and June, 45 projects worth an estimated $68bn were blocked or delayed.

That opposition to the infrastructure that trains and powers AI models, and growing public distrust of the industry itself, has become one of the defining bipartisan issues ahead of the midterm elections.

President Trump, who has made AI the centerpiece of his second-term economic agenda, lashed out in an August Truth Social post that communities that opposed AI datacenters risked ending up “backwards and poor”.

At the local level, more than 500 counties and municipalities now seek to ban or restrict datacenters, according to an analysis from the climate news site HeatMap."

I Used AI to Fake a Scientific Paper. Here’s What Happened: My experiment with an IEEE journal revealed AI’s threats to scholarly publishing; IEEE Spectrum, October 27, 2026

BENJAMIN SKUSE, IEEE Spectrum; I Used AI to Fake a Scientific Paper. Here’s What Happened: My experiment with an IEEE journal revealed AI’s threats to scholarly publishing

"According to all reports, academic publishing is drowning in what has come to be called AI slop: low-quality, mass-produced content generated with AI. By 2025, an estimated 57 percent of all published academic articles exhibited detectable evidence of large language model (LLM) influence, a massive jump from 12 percent in 2023. What’s more, over 12 percent of Nature Communicationsreviews were found to be completely AI-generated in 2025.

Given that for every 40 papers showing statistical evidence of AI usage in 2025, only one formally disclosed it, these figures likely grossly underestimate LLM involvement today. Of course, evidence of AI use doesn’t necessarily mean a paper is slop. But some estimates suggest that hundreds of thousands of fake, often AI-generated, publications are now produced annually.

“It’s not just the [scientific] record under threat, it’s science as a whole,” warns Amanda Sulicz, IEEE’s research-integrity manager. “AI slop is completely eroding trust in science and every scientific process that we’ve worked for centuries to create.”

Yet statistics and statements claiming that the problem is big—perhaps even existential for science—don’t really get the message across. Just how easy is it to use AI to create a convincing but completely fake paper? And without adding even more to the burden on stretched peer reviewers, who do this work on a volunteer basis, do publishers have the tools to keep AI slop out of the scientific record?

Borrowing from the idea of “vibe coding,” in which programmers use natural-language prompts to generate code, I decided to “vibe-research” a made-up paper by prompting LLMs to generate hypotheses, code, and text with minimal human input. Then I asked Jenny Mahoney, managing editor of the multidisciplinary and open-access journal IEEE Access, if we could war-game an attempt to sneak my AI-generated monstrosity past her journal’s defenses. She and IEEE kindly agreed."

He Shot an Iconic Photo—and Lost the Copyright; FStoppers, October 31, 2026

 Alex Cooke, FStoppers ; He Shot an Iconic Photo—and Lost the Copyright

"Lester LaRue shot 44 frames on the morning of April 19, 1995, with his employer's camera, his employer's film, and his employer's car to get him there. One of those frames ran on the cover of Newsweek's May 1 issue. A federal court later ruled the copyrights had never been his...

What This Means for the Camera in Your Bag

If you draw a paycheck and you take pictures, this is the case to read. The doctrine does not weigh how good the photograph is, or whether your employer could ever have imagined it, and it does not require the picture to depict the business. The test comes out of agency law and asks three things: whether the work was the kind you were employed to perform, whether it happened substantially within the time and space your job authorized, and whether you were acting at least partly to serve your employer. Whose camera you were holding is evidence going to those questions, not a fourth question. LaRue lost because every one of the three pointed the same way, and staff shooters, in-house content producers, safety officers, and real estate agents lose the same way every year without a Newsweek cover to show for it.

Section 201(b) leaves one lever, the written instrument. Ownership between an employee and an employer can be reallocated, but only in a signed writing, and the practical time to get one is before anything happens in front of the lens. The Copyright Office's own guidance for photographers is blunt about the same point, and if you are building a business around images you expect to license later, the contract side deserves as much attention as the business of commercial photography itself. Freelancers get the better end of this: under Section 101, a commissioned photograph is a work made for hire only in narrow enumerated categories, and only with a signed agreement.

The publicity half of the case cuts the other direction, and it travels badly. Oklahoma tied its statute to what the naked eye can determine from the photograph alone, so an obscured face defeated the claim no matter what the caption said. Other states draw the line differently, and identifiability standards vary enough that a shot that is safe in one jurisdiction is exposure in another."

The 5 forces creating urgency around ethical AI adoption; MIT Management MIT Sloan, October 28, 2026

Jeffrey N. Saviano, MIT Management MIT Sloan; The 5 forces creating urgency around ethical AI adoption

"Artificial intelligence is fueling innovation across industries, but it’s also introducing unanticipated risks and consequences for organizations. 

In this landscape, traditional enterprise risk management frameworks are no longer sufficient, and AI governance becomes a leadership question — one that “reaches the boardroom and senior executive teams,” according to Jeffrey Saviano, an MIT Sloan School of Management senior lecturer who spent three decades at EY. 

In an excerpt from his new book, “Boundaries of Tolerance: A Foundational Model for Ethical AI Strategy and Governance,” Saviano examines five forces that create urgency for adopting ethical AI solutions and practices."

Inside a Ukrainian city hit by Russian drones during the Starlink disruption; PBS, October 30, 2026

Simon Ostrovsky, Katia Patin, Kateryna Hatsenko, PBS; Inside a Ukrainian city hit by Russian drones during the Starlink disruption

"In Ukraine, President Zelenskyy made the clearest indication yet that a disruption of Starlink technology contributed to civilian deaths. Elon Musk admitted last week to ordering the slowdown of the service. The intentional hindrance of Ukrainian defenses led to bipartisan anger in Washington."

Florida’s Big Tech Brawler Finally Meets the Voters; Politico, October 31, 2026

ANDREW ATTERBURY, Politico; Florida’s Big Tech Brawler Finally Meets the Voters

"Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier telegraphed what was coming before even saying a word. At his podium, just like his former boss, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, had done so many times, he taped a red, white and blue sign that read: “Stop big tech surveillance.”

Taking swipes at tech titans is a common theme for the Sunshine State’s top legal official. Just the day before, at a press conference in Tampa, Uthmeier had attached a poster to a podium blasting OpenAI for its use of chatbots...

As Congress punts on regulating AI and tech titans openly fret about its existential threat, Florida stands out as an example for those who hope to decelerate the frantic growth of AI. There’s a reason for that. Last year, after Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody departed for the Senate, DeSantis installed a key player to score points for the governor’s tech agenda: Uthmeier, his former chief of staff. Through a combination of subpoenas, lawsuits and constant public pressure, Uthmeier has aggressively positioned Florida’s most powerful legal office into a new front in the battle over artificial intelligence and the tech companies behind it."

Men detained at Texas’s ‘dog pound’ ICE facility describe their experience – in art, letters and song; The Guardian, October 31, 2026

José Olivares, The Guardian ; Men detained at Texas’s ‘dog pound’ ICE facility describe their experience – in art, letters and song

Nearly 500 men are detained at the T Don Hutto detention facility, and many have risked sharing their experiences in a unique way

"What goes on inside Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers across the US happens behind closed doors and high fences.

Personal accounts of lengthy detention, misery and sickness and allegations of abuse rarely reach the public directly while people are still behind bars.

But a group of men detained in Texas found a new way to communicate what they are going through in custody, despite being shuttered from the outside world. They compiled hundreds of pages of handwritten testimony and some hand-drawn art, and mailed it from inside the privately run ICE jail...

“These first-hand accounts reveal more than what is happening inside a single detention facility. They expose an entire system that strips people of their dignity, separates families and treats fundamental constitutional rights as optional,” said DaMareo Cooper, co-founder of the New York-based Center for Popular Democracy, a progressive advocacy organization. “What is equally powerful is the extraordinary courage of those risking so much to speak out. Behind every testimony, every piece of artwork and every story is a human being enduring unimaginable pain.”

In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that “any allegations of subprime conditions or misconduct at the T. Don Hutto Detention Center are FALSE”."

Climate skeptics used AI to review their work. It told them they were biased.; Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, October 31, 2026

Jessica McKenzie , Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; Climate skeptics used AI to review their work. It told them they were biased.

"Scientists handpicked by the Trump administration to write a critical review of climate science used various LLMs to review their work, only to find that AI told them they were cherry-picking their facts and using “outdated or narrow sourcing.”

Earlier this year, a judge ruled that the Energy Department and Secretary Chris Wright violated the law when he convened a group of climate experts to write a critical review of climate science and the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions. Specifically, the judge determined the agency violated the provisions of the Federal Advisory Committee Act that stipulate advisory groups must be open, transparent, and balanced.

The judge ordered emails and other documents related to the Climate Working Group report released to the environmental advocacy groups that sued the agency, and in March, the Environmental Defense Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists released those documents to the public—all 4,167 500-page PDFs."

The Smartest People in AI Believe This Is the World’s Most Important Chart; Wall Street Journal, October 30, 2026

Ben Cohen, Wall Street Journal; The Smartest People in AI Believe This Is the World’s Most Important Chart

"Since the days when artificial intelligence seemed more like fiction than science, one idea has captivated the field’s top researchers."