Chris Christie, The New York Times; Chris Christie: Keep Sports Betting Legal
Mr. Christie served as governor of New Jersey from 2010 to 2018. After leaving office, he served as an adviser to DraftKings until 2021.
"It’s time we recognize that legal sports betting brings with it effective regulation that protects fans, teams, leagues and sports themselves — and work together to protect and build on that success."
JULIE O'DONOGHUE, Louisiana Illuminator; In Louisiana, casinos can’t make political donations, but sportsbooks can, ethics board says
"Louisiana prohibits casino companies and executives from making state political contributions, but that same ban doesn’t apply to sports gambling operations, according to the Louisiana Board of Ethics.
A sport betting company and its senior management can still make political donations, even if the business is a subsidiary of a larger gambling enterprise prohibited from doing so.
The ethics board issued an advisory opinion last week to American Wagering Inc., saying the company, as well as its officers and directors, can legally give to political candidates. The activity is allowed even though the business, which goes by the name Caesars Sportsbook Louisiana, is owned by the gambling conglomerate, Caesars Entertainment Inc."
, SFGate; Trump admin to ban book from Yosemite National Park, says author
"A prominent Bay Area author said one of his books has been quietly flagged at Yosemite National Park as part of a March 2025 federal directive aiming to remove and revise “negative” information relating to American history.
Naturalist and illustrator Obi Kaufmann wrote in a Facebook post this week that his 2019 book, “The State of Water: Understanding California’s Most Precious Resource,” was identified by park officials as restricted under President Donald Trump’s executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Kaufmann said the flagging means that while Yosemite bookstores will not pull copies from the shelves, they will no longer purchase new copies of his book.
“The State of Water” explores what has led to California’s current water crisis, “exposing a history of unlimited growth in spite of finite natural resources,” according to its publisher, Heyday Books. In the book, Kaufmann cautions against further developing California’s waterways, highlighting that conserving and restoring the ecosystem is not only a moral issue but a matter of survival."
; ‘This Is the War Against Human Nature’: Paul Kingsnorth argues technology is killing us - physically and spiritually.
"A lot of people, myself included, are worried about where technology is taking the human race, and especially how we can stay human in an age of artificial intelligence.
But my guest this week thinks we’re not worried enough. That some kind of apocalypse is all but inevitable — if it isn’t already upon us. That what’s needed now are strategies of resistance, endurance and escape.
And he practices what he preaches, having retreated to the west of Ireland with his family — the better to keep them out of the clutches of what he calls the machine.
But he’s come back to us, for a time, bearing a prophetic message.
Paul Kingsnorth is a novelist and a critic, an environmental activist and a convert to Eastern Orthodoxy. His new book is “Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity.”
John Frank, Ashley Gold, Axios ; Inside Colorado's "bullish with guardrails" AI approach
"Colorado's approach to integrating artificial intelligence into government functions is "bullish with guardrails."
Why it matters: Colorado offers a model for balancing AI innovation with safety, barring the technology from "anything that looks or smells or could possibly be thought of as a consequential decision," David Edinger, the state's chief information officer, told Axios in an interview.
Driving the news: The approach is a directive from Gov. Jared Polis, a former technology entrepreneur who encouraged the state's technology office to embrace AI in government.
The state's Office of Information and Technology created a framework for AI use with the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, considering the needs of different state agencies.
Kaitlyn Huamani , Los Angeles Times; ‘South Park’ addresses AI-generated videos and copyright with Totoro, Trump and Bluey
"Droopy Dog, Rocky, Bullwinkle, Popeye and even the beloved preschool character Bluey are mentioned or make appearances in the episode. Representatives for Studio Ghibli also appear, offering a voice of reason in the madness, saying, “You cannot just do whatever you want with someone else’s IP.”"
Ken Bensinger, The New York Times; Who Pays When A.I. Is Wrong?
"Search results that Gemini, Google’s artificial intelligence technology, delivered at the top of the page included the falsehoods. And mentions of a legal settlement populated automatically when they typed “Wolf River Electric” in the search box.
With cancellations piling up and their attempts to use Google’s tools to correct the issues proving fruitless, Wolf River executives decided they had no choice but to sue the tech giant for defamation.
“We put a lot of time and energy into building up a good name,” said Justin Nielsen, who founded Wolf River with three of his best friends in 2014 and helped it grow into the state’s largest solar contractor. “When customers see a red flag like that, it’s damn near impossible to win them back.”
Theirs is one of at least six defamation cases filed in the United States in the past two years over content produced by A.I. tools that generate text and images. They argue that the cutting-edge technology not only created and published false, damaging information about individuals or groups but, in many cases, continued putting it out even after the companies that built and profit from the A.I. models were made aware of the problem.
Unlike other libel or slander suits, these cases seek to define content that was not created by human beings as defamatory — a novel concept that has captivated some legal experts."
Russell Contreras , Isaac Avilucea, Axios; Meet chatbot Jesus: Churches tap AI to save souls — and time
"A new digital awakening is unfolding in churches, where pastors and prayer apps are turning to artificial intelligence to reach worshippers, personalize sermons, and power chatbots that resemble God.
Why it matters: AI is helping some churches stay relevant in the face of shrinking staff, empty pews and growing online audiences. But the practice raises new questions about who, or what, is guiding the flock.
State of play: The U.S. could see an unprecedented 15,000 churches shut their doors this year as a record number of Americans (29%) now are identifying as religiously unaffiliated.
Zoom in: In recent months, churches have been deploying chatbots to answer frequently asked questions such as service times and event details, and even to share scripture.
Nicole Brachetti Peretti , Time; AI Regulation is Not Enough. We Need AI Morals
"Pope Leo XIV recently called for “builders of AI to cultivate moral discernment as a fundamental part of their work—to develop systems that reflect justice, solidarity, and a genuine reverence for life.”
Some tech leaders, including Andreessen Horowitz cofounder Marc Andreessen have mocked such calls. But to do so is a mistake. We don’t just need AI regulation—we need AI morals."
Michael Levenson, The New York Times; Former Chess Champion Faces Ethics Complaint After a Grandmaster’s Death
"The global governing body for the game of chess said on Tuesday that it had filed an ethics complaint against a Russian grandmaster and former world champion who was accused of bullying Daniel Naroditsky, a popular American grandmaster, before Mr. Naroditsky died last month at age 29.
The organization, the International Chess Federation, filed the complaint after many in the chess world expressed anger that the former world champion, Vladimir Kramnik, had repeatedly insinuated, in videos, comments and posts, that Mr. Naroditsky had cheated when he played chess online."
Nate Jones , The Washington Post; State Department deleted records about risk of inadvertent nuclear war
"I blinked and blinked again, until I was finally satisfied that I was not hallucinating: Key historical records had been removed without explanation.
The State Department had deleted history.
Let me back up. Since 1991, the department has been required by law to publish “a thorough, accurate, and reliable” history of U.S. foreign policy within 30 years of the events. It does this in the Foreign Relations of the United States series, curated collections of primary source documents abbreviated as FRUS.
The State Department has published more than 450 volumes, which include thousands of primary source records detailing the crafting of U.S. foreign policy dating back to the Lincoln administration. The thick, bound ruby buckram volumes are a staple on the bookshelves of many college history departments where they remain an invaluable tool for students, scholars and authors.
But in the internet era, FRUS has become a predominantly digital publication, hosted on the State Department’s website.
And it is easier to delete digital records than to destroy books.
This January, the State Department did just that when it republished on its website a volume about the Reagan administration — without 15 pages on the risk of inadvertent nuclear war sparked by a 1983 NATO exercise."
MATILDA BATTERSBY , The Bookseller; OpenAI copyright case reveals 'ease with which generative AI can devastate the market', says PA
"A judge’s ruling that legal action by authors against OpenAI for copyright infringement can go ahead reveals “the ease with which generative AI can devastate the market”, according to the Publishers Association (PA).
Last week, a federal judge in the US refused OpenAI’s attempts to dismiss claims by authors that text summaries of published works by ChatGPT (which is owned by OpenAI) infringes their copyrights.
The lawsuit, which is being heard in New York, brings together cases from a number of authors, as well as the Authors Guild, filed in various courts.
In his ruling, which upheld the authors’ right to attempt to sue OpenAI, District Judge Sidney Stein compared George RR Martin’s Game of Thrones to summaries of the novel created by ChatGPT.
Judge Stein said: “[A] discerning observer could easily conclude that this detailed summary is substantially similar to Martin’s original work because the summary conveys the overall tone and feel of the original work by parroting the plot, characters and themes of the original.”
The class action consolidates 12 complaints being brought against OpenAI and Microsoft. It argues copyrighted books were reproduced to train OpenAI’s artificial intelligence large language models (LLM) and, crucially, that LLMs, including ChatGPT, can infringe copyright via their output, ie the text produced when asked a question.
This landmark legal case is the first to examine whether the output of an AI chatbot infringes copyright, rather than looking at whether the training of the model was an infringement."
Adam Nagourney, Heather Knight, Kellen Browning and Laurel Rosenhall, The New York Times ; A Light in Very Dark Days: Nancy Pelosi and AIDS
"Ms. Pelosi, the new member of Congress representing San Francisco at the time, asked the nurses if they had what they needed and if any patients were up for a bedside visit. Then she would slip into their rooms alone.
“Early on, it was not seen as a wise or popular thing to do, to champion people with AIDS, of all things,” Mr. Wolf, 74, recalled. “You didn’t want to align yourself too closely, but she didn’t care. We were her constituents, and she went to bat for us over and over and over again.”...
Ms. Pelosi, who announced on Thursday her plans to retire from Congress, is known nationally as a Washington leader praised by Democrats for standing up to President Trump and derided by Republicans as a symbol of the radical excesses of the left. But back home, her reputation was shaped by how she stepped forward at the earliest and most terrifying moment of a local crisis and how she fought to help her constituents deal with the AIDS epidemic and fight for L.G.B.T.Q. rights.
The public side of this is by now well-known: How over decades spent in Congress she fought for money for AIDS research and treatment or invited prominent AIDS and gay rights activists to be at her side at the State of the Union address and other events. But much of it took place away from the public eye. It’s those moments many of her gay constituents in San Francisco talk about as she approaches the end of her congressional career."
"Debra D’Agostino, a federal employment lawyer, argued that Mei probably has a strong case against her dismissal. Mei’s speech was almost certainly protected under both the First Amendment and the Whistleblower Protection Act, D’Agostino said.
There have been at least two Supreme Court cases — Pickering v. Board of Education in 1968 and Department of Homeland Security v. MacLean in 2015 — in which the justices decided in favor of staffers accused by their employers of speaking out of turn, D’Agostino noted. In the first, the court ruled for a teacher who had written to a newspaper criticizing the superintendent, saying the educator had a right to speak on matters of public concern so long as she was not knowingly lying.
In the second, the court ruled for a Transportation Security Administration staffer who the government accused of revealing “sensitive security information” to a reporter. In that case, the court decided the staffer’s activity was covered by the Whistleblower Protection Act, which says federal workers can report lawbreaking or anything that poses a substantial and specific danger to public health and safety."
Thomas Banchoff , The Washington Post; What happened to mercy?
"Decades ago, Pope John Paul II made a plea for mercy. His 1980 encyclical “Dives in Misericordia” (“Rich in Mercy”) emphasized God’s forgiving love toward humanity and decried a widespread tendency to “remove from the human heart the very idea of mercy.” Instead of mercy, John Paul saw a rise in “spite, hatred and even cruelty.”
Mercy is painfully scarce in our politics today. When the Right Rev. Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, appealed to President Donald Trump from the pulpit in January to show mercy toward the vulnerable, the president bristled and demanded an apology. In the months since, his administration’s policies have been rife with cruelty, from eliminating life-giving aid programs abroad to threatening to withhold food assistance for more than 40 million Americans."
Elizabeth Dias , The New York Times; Catholic Bishops Rebuke U.S. ‘Mass Deportation’ of Immigrants
"America’s Roman Catholic bishops on Wednesday rebuked the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation campaign in a rare and near-unanimous statement that framed the immigration crisis in starkly moral terms.
The statement, passed at the bishops’ annual conference in Baltimore, did not call out President Trump by name, but the context was clear. The bishops said they “oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of people” and “pray for an end to dehumanizing rhetoric and violence, whether directed at immigrants or at law enforcement.”
“We as Catholic bishops love our country and pray for its peace and prosperity,” the statement said. “For this very reason, we feel compelled now in this environment to raise our voices in defense of God-given human dignity.”
The bishops, who were often divided by American politics in the Pope Francis era, showed a united front in standing behind Pope Leo XIV, the first pope from the United States, who has spoken out for immigrants and urged U.S. bishops to do the same."
Sara Braun , The Guardian; One-third of museums lost government funding since Trump took office, survey says
"One-third of US museums have lost government grants or contracts since Donald Trump took office, according to a new survey.
The findings, released by the American Alliance of Museums on Tuesday and based on responses from more than 500 museum directors across the US, shed new light on the challenges cultural institutions are facing under the Trump administration.
Among the museums affected by cancelled government contracts or unreimbursed expenditures, the survey found that the median loss was $30,000. The most common cancelled grants were from the Institute of Museum of Library Services, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Endowment of the Arts. Two-thirds of the respondent museums reported that the lost funding has not been replaced by foundations, sponsors or donors."
David A. Graham, The Atlantic; Baseball’s Big Whiff on Gambling
"Gambling is a numbers game, so here are a few: The pitcher Emmanuel Clase’s 2025 salary from Major League Baseball’s Cleveland Guardians is $4.5 million dollars. This weekend, prosecutors unveiled charges that he had made just $12,000 from two recent rigged pitches. And he could face as many as 65 years in prison (though such a stiff sentence seems unlikely).
Clase and the fellow Guardians hurler Luis Ortiz were indicted last week for their involvement in the scheme, which allegedly netted bettors hundreds of thousands of dollars. (Attorneys for Clase and Ortiz have denied the allegations.) The scheme outlined in the indictment is the latest instance of legalized gambling’s corrosive influence on professional sports. Major leagues have welcomed the industry with open arms and greedy palms, signing contracts with betting companies and bringing casinos into stadiums and arenas, but they act astonished when gambling starts to corrupt their own players."
Evan Gorelick , The New York Times; Vigilante Lawyers Expose the Rising Tide of A.I. Slop in Court Filings
"Mr. Freund is part of a growing network of lawyers who track down A.I. abuses committed by their peers, collecting the most egregious examples and posting them online. The group hopes that by tracking down the A.I. slop, it can help draw attention to the problem and put an end to it.
While judges and bar associations generally agree that it’s fine for lawyers to use chatbots for research, they must still ensure their filings are accurate.
But as the technology has taken off, so has misuse. Chatbots frequently make things up, and judges are finding more and more fake case law citations, which are then rounded up by the legal vigilantes.
“These cases are damaging the reputation of the bar,” said Stephen Gillers, an ethics professor at New York University School of Law. “Lawyers everywhere should be ashamed of what members of their profession are doing.”...
The problem, though, keeps getting worse.
That’s why Damien Charlotin, a lawyer and researcher in France, started an online database in April to track it.
Initially he found three or four examples a month. Now he often receives that many in a day.
Many lawyers, including Mr. Freund and Mr. Schaefer, have helped him document 509 cases so far. They use legal tools like LexisNexis for notifications on keywords like “artificial intelligence,” “fabricated cases” and “nonexistent cases.”
Some of the filings include fake quotes from real cases, or cite real cases that are irrelevant to their arguments. The legal vigilantes uncover them by finding judges’ opinions scolding lawyers."
Katelyn Chedraoui, CNET ; AI Has Sent Copyright Laws Into Chaos. What You Need to Know About Your Rights Online
"You might not think about copyright very often, but we are all copyright owners and authors. In the age of generative AI, copyright has quickly become one of the most important issues in the development and outputs of chatbots, image and video generators...
What does all of this mean for the future?
Copyright owners are in a bit of a holding pattern for now. But beyond the legal and ethical implications, copyright in the age of AI raises important questions about the value of creative work, the cost of innovation and the ways in which we need or ought to have government intervention and protections."
Dan Montgomery , American Libraries; Ready to Go: Joining the fight to defend libraries, workers, and the right to read
"When the interview committee asked why I was interested in the executive director position at the American Library Association (ALA), I replied, doing my best impression of famed mountaineer George Mallory: “Because it’s the ALA!” I was responding, of course, to my belief in libraries and in the right to read, both of which have been under serious attack. And library workers and advocates who defend reading, books, and unfettered access to knowledge are critical to protecting American democracy. So, to be part of the organization most squarely in the forefront of that cause seemed to me an unmissable opportunity, and a great honor."
Lanre Bakare, The Guardian ; ‘This is fascist America’: Anish Kapoor may sue after border agents pose by his sculpture
"The artist Anish Kapoor is considering taking legal action after border patrol agents posed for a photo in front of his Cloud Gate sculpture in Chicago, saying the scene represented “fascist America”...
Kapoor took legal action against the National Rifle Association (NRA) after they used an image of Cloud Gate, which was installed in 2006 and is known locally as “the Bean”, in an advert.
He settled out of court with the NRA in 2018. “It’s a bit more complicated with this,” Kapoor said of the more recent incident, “because they’re a full, if you like, national army unit.”"
Jörn Poltz and Friederike Heine, Reuters ; OpenAI used song lyrics in violation of copyright laws, German court says
"OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT violated German copyright laws by reproducing lyrics from songs by best-selling musician Herbert Groenemeyer and others, a court ruled on Tuesday, in a closely watched case against the U.S. firm over its use of lyrics to train its language models.
The regional court in Munich found that the company trained its AI on protected content from nine German songs, including Groenemeyer's hits "Maenner" and "Bochum"."
