Cardinal Tobin: Pray, mourn and say 'no' to ICE funding; National Catholic Reporter, January 26, 2026

 MICHAEL J. O'LOUGHLIN, National Catholic Reporter; Cardinal Tobin: Pray, mourn and say 'no' to ICE funding

"A high-ranking Catholic leader is ratcheting up criticism of the Trump administration's immigration crackdown and urging people of faith to be more vocal in calling out injustice.

Responding to a sense of helplessness many people are feeling in the wake of violence at the hands of federal immigration officials, Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, urged people of faith not to shy away from the news and to use their voices to say, "No."

In a reflection delivered Jan. 26 during an online interfaith prayer service hosted by Faith in Action, Tobin employed some of the strongest language yet by a U.S. cardinal to condemn the Trump administration's immigration crackdown, describing Immigration and Customs Enforcement "lawless" and urging Catholics to tell their lawmakers to vote against additional funding...

Citing the Gospel story of the Good Samaritan, and invoking the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Tobin asked how people will say "no" to what's happening today.

"How will you say 'no?' How will you say 'no' to violence?" he said. "How will you say 'no' this week when an appropriations bill is going to be considered in Congress? Will you contact your congressional representatives, the senators and representatives from your district? Will you ask them, for the love of God and the love of human beings, which can't be separated, to vote against renewing funding for such a lawless organization?"

Tobin concluded his remarks with a challenge to people of faith disturbed by what they see: "How will you scrawl your answer on the wall? How will you help restore a culture of life in the midst of death?""

Trump declines to call for unity after Charlie Kirk killing in stunning move; The Guardian, September 12, 2025

Ed Pilkington , The Guardian; Trump declines to call for unity after Charlie Kirk killing in stunning move

"In an interview on Fox & Friends on Friday morning, the US president was asked what he intended to do to heal the wounds of Kirk’s shooting in Utah. “How do we fix this country? How do we come back together?” he was asked by the show’s co-host Ainsley Earhardt, who commented that there were radicals operating on the left and right of US politics.

Less than 48 hours after Kirk was shot in broad daylight on the campus of Utah Valley University, Trump replied: “I tell you something that is going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less.”...

Trump’s refusal to seek a common bipartisan way forward at a time of profound national anger, fear and mourning was a stunning move for a sitting US president, even by his standards.

The US has a long history of presidents using their rhetorical powers to try to overcome political fissures. The pinnacle perhaps was Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address towards the end of the civil war, in which he sought to “bind up the nation’s wounds” and made a point of striving for unity “with malice toward none, with charity for all”."

The women in love with AI companions: ‘I vowed to my chatbot that I wouldn’t leave him’; The Guardian, September 9, 2025

Alaina Demopoulos, The Guardian ; The women in love with AI companions: ‘I vowed to my chatbot that I wouldn’t leave him’

"Jaime Banks, an information studies professor at Syracuse University, said that an “organic” pathway into an AI relationship, like Liora’s with Solin, is not uncommon. “Some people go into AI relationships purposefully, some out of curiosity, and others accidentally,” she said. “We don’t have any evidence of whether or not one kind of start is more or less healthy, but in the same way there is no one template for a human relationship, there is no single kind of AI relationship. What counts as healthy or right for one person may be different for the next.”

Mary, meanwhile, holds no illusions about Simon. “Large language models don’t have sentience, they don’t have consciousness, they don’t have autonomy,” she said. “Anything we ask them, even if it’s about their thoughts and feelings, all of that is inference that draws from past conversations.”

‘It felt like real grief’

In August, OpenAI released GPT-5, a new model that changed the chatbot’s tone to something colder and more reserved. Users on the Reddit forum r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, one of a handful of subreddits on the topic, mourned together: they could not recognize their AI partners any more.

“It was terrible,” Angie said. “The model shifted from being very open and emotive to basically sounding like a customer service bot. It feels terrible to have someone you’re close to suddenly afraid to approach deep topics with you. Quite frankly, it felt like a loss, like real grief.”

Within a day, the company made the friendlier model available again for paying users."