Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, left, and Keir Starmer, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom greet each other, ahead of their bilateral meeting at the 6th European Political Community summit Friday May 16, 2025 in Tirana, Albania. (Leon Neal/Pool via AP, File)2025-05-19T04:16:42Z LONDON (AP) The U.K. and the European Union will meet in London on Monday to discuss closer ties in their first official summit since Brexit.The meeting between U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and top EU officials, including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, is intended to pave the way toward a new agreement between both sides. There is hope that a deal could improve the British economy, which has been hit by a drop in EU trade caused by increased costs and red tape after the United Kingdom left the bloc in 2020. Resetting relationsSince becoming prime minister in July, Starmer has sought to reset relations with the EU, following years of tensions in the wake of the U.K.'s Brexit referendum on June 23, 2016.Post-Brexit relations have been governed by a trade agreement negotiated by then Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Starmer thinks that can be improved in a way that boosts trade and bolsters security.Its unclear what will be announced at the summit, but Starmer said Sunday that there would be a deal, following trade agreements that the U.K. struck in recent weeks with India and the U.S.Tomorrow, we take another step forwards, with yet more benefits for the United Kingdom as the result of a strengthened partnership with the European Union, he said. It will be good for our jobs, good for our bills and good for our borders. Seeking a better dealSince the Labour Party returned to power after 14 years of Conservative government, a period that was largely marked by the time leading up to the Brexit vote and its aftermath, both sides have sought to improve relations.Thats been most evident in the more coordinated response to Russias full-scale invasion of Ukraine in the wake of a change of approach by Washington following the return of U.S. President Donald Trump.Starmer, who campaigned for the U.K. to remain within the EU in the referendum and subsequently sought a second vote, has said that he wants a better deal with the 27-nation bloc that will smooth trade between the two sides and bolster security cooperation, including on defense procurement. Non-tariff barriersThough no tariffs are slapped on the export of goods between both sides, an array of non-tariff barriers, including more onerous border checks and laborious paperwork, have made trade more difficult.Post-Brexit visa restrictions have also hobbled the cross-border activities of service professionals, such as bankers or lawyers, as well as cultural exchanges, including touring bands and school trips. Before the summit the first in what are planned to be annual events Starmer said that good progress had been made in negotiations, while insisting that the U.K. wont breach his red lines. In its election manifesto last year, Labour said that it wouldnt rejoin the EUs frictionless single market and customs union, nor agree to the free movement of people between the U.K. and the EU. Security, defense and youth mobilityTalks on strengthening ties have focused largely on security and defense, and on a youth mobility plan that would allow young Britons and Europeans to live and work temporarily in each others territory.That remains a politically touchy issue in the U.K., seen by some Brexiteers as inching back towards free movement though the U.K. already has youth mobility arrangements with countries including Australia and Canada.Cabinet Office minister Nick Thomas-Symonds, who is leading negotiations, said that talks with the EU were going down to the wire.The issue of fishingThe summit is expected to lead to more intense discussions on an array of issues, including aligning standards on the sale of agricultural products that could eliminate costly checks on food products exported across the English Channel, closer energy ties and a new fishing pact. While he wouldnt provide details, Thomas-Symonds said that he was confident that trade could be improved for food imports and exports. We know weve had lorries waiting for 16 hours, fresh food in the back not able to be exported, because frankly its just going off, red tape, all the certifications that are required, we absolutely want to reduce that, he told the BBC.Disagreements reportedly remain over fishing, an economically minor but symbolically large issue for the U.K. and EU member states such as France. Disputes over the issue nearly derailed a Brexit deal back in 2020. Starmers plummeting popularityAs in all negotiations, some of the trade-offs may prove difficult, especially for Starmer, whose popularity has plummeted in recent months. Earlier this month, the anti-immigration and pro-Brexit Reform U.K. won big in local elections. Starmer knows that he will face likely accusations of betraying Brexit, whatever the outcome of the talks. The ever-unpredictable Trump, who has backed Brexit, could also be a potential headache for Starmer. The reset could still be blown off course by disagreements over how to consolidate existing areas of cooperation like fisheries and/or external factors, such as a negative reaction from the U.S. to the U.K. seeking closer ties with the EU, said Jannike Wachowiak, research associate at the UK in a Changing Europe think tank. JILL LAWLESS Lawless is an Associated Press reporter covering U.K. politics and more. She is based in London. twitter mailto

An American Flag is posted near destroyed homes, Sunday, May 18, 2025, in London, Ky., after a severe storm passed through the area. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)2025-05-19T04:17:16Z LONDON, Ky. (AP) More severe storms were expected to roll across the central U.S. this week following the weather-related deaths of more than two dozen people and a devastating Kentucky tornado.The National Weather Service said a multitude of hazardous weather would impact the U.S. over the next several days from thunderstorms and potentially baseball-sized hail on the Plains, to heavy mountain snow in the West and dangerous heat in the South.Areas at risk of thunderstorms include communities in Kentucky and Missouri that were hit by Fridays tornadoes. In London, Kentucky, people whose houses were destroyed scrambled Sunday to put tarps over salvageable items or haul them away for safe storage, said Zach Wilson. His parents house was in ruins, their belongings scattered.Were trying the hardest to get anything that looks of value and getting it protected, especially pictures and papers and things like that, he said.Heres the latest on the recent storms, some tornado history and where to look out for the next weather impacts. Deadly storms claim dozens of livesAt least 19 people were killed and 10 seriously injured in Kentucky, where a tornado on Friday damaged hundreds of homes and tossed vehicles in southeastern Laurel County. 0fficials said the death toll could rise and that three people remained in critical condition Sunday.Wilson said he raced to his parents home in London, Kentucky, after the storm. It was dark and still raining but every lightning flash, it was lighting up your nightmares: Everything was gone, he said. The thankful thing was me and my brother got here and got them out of where they had barricaded themselves.Survey teams were expected on the ground Monday so the state can apply for federal disaster assistance, Gov. Andy Beshear said. Some of the two dozen state roads that had closures could take days to reopen.In St. Louis, five people died and 38 were injured as the storm system swept through on Friday, according to Mayor Cara Spencer. More than 5,000 homes in the city were affected, she said. On Sunday, city inspectors were going through damaged areas to condemn unsafe structures, Spencer said. She asked for people not to sightsee in damaged areas.A tornado that started in the St. Louis suburb of Clayton traveled at least eight miles (13 kilometers), had 150-mph (241-kph) winds and had a maximum width of one mile (1.6 kilometers), according to the weather service. It touched down in the area of Forest Park, home to the St. Louis Zoo and the site of the 1904 Worlds Fair and the Olympic Games that same year.In Scott County, about 130 miles (209 kilometers) south of St. Louis, a tornado killed two people, injured several others and destroyed multiple homes, Sheriff Derick Wheetley wrote on social media.The weather system spawned tornadoes in Wisconsin and temporarily enveloped parts of Illinois including Chicago in a pall of dust. Two people were killed in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., by falling trees while driving.The storms hit after the Trump administration cut staffing of National Weather Service offices, with outside experts worrying about how it would affect warnings in disasters such as tornadoes. A history of tornadoesThe majority of the worlds tornadoes occur in the U.S., which has about 1,200 annually. Researchers in 2018 found that deadly tornadoes were happening less frequently in the traditional Tornado Alley of Oklahoma, Kansas and Texas and more frequently in parts of the more densely populated and tree-filled South. They can happen any time of day or night, but certain times of the year bring peak tornado season. Thats from May into early June for the southern Plains and earlier in the spring on the Gulf Coast.The deadliest tornado in Kentuckys history was hundreds of yards wide when it tore through downtown Louisvilles business district in March 1890, collapsing multistory buildings including one with 200 people inside. Seventy-six people were killed.The last tornado to cause mass fatalities in Kentucky was a December 2021 twister that lasted almost five hours. It traveled some 165 miles (266 kilometers), leaving a path of destruction that included 57 dead and more than 500 injured, according to the weather service. Officials recorded at least 41 tornadoes during that storm, which killed at least 77 people statewide.On the same day, a deadly tornado struck the St. Louis area, killing six people at an Amazon facility in nearby Illinois. More storms threaten in coming daysThunderstorms with potentially damaging winds were forecast for a region stretching from northeast Colorado to central Texas.And tornadoes will again be a threat particularly from central Kansas to Oklahoma, according to the National Weather Service.Meanwhile, triple-digit temperatures were forecast for parts of south Texas with the potential to break daily records. The hot, dry air also sets the stage for critical wildfire conditions through early this week in southern New Mexico and West Texas.Up to a foot of snow was expected in parts of Idaho and western Montana.___Brown reported from Billings, Montana. MATTHEW BROWN Brown is based in Billings, Montana. He covers breaking news, the environment, politics, energy, crime and more.

A dragon blood's tree overlooks a natural infinity pool within Homhil Protected Area on the Yemeni island of Socotra on Sept. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag)2025-05-19T03:34:51Z SOCOTRA, Yemen (AP) On a windswept plateau high above the Arabian Sea, Sena Keybani cradles a sapling that barely reaches her ankle. The young plant, protected by a makeshift fence of wood and wire, is a kind of dragons blood tree a species found only on the Yemeni island of Socotra that is now struggling to survive intensifying threats from climate change.Seeing the trees die, its like losing one of your babies, said Keybani, whose family runs a nursery dedicated to preserving the species. Known for their mushroom-shaped canopies and the blood-red sap that courses through their wood, the trees once stood in great numbers. But increasingly severe cyclones, grazing by invasive goats, and persistent turmoil in Yemen which is one of the worlds poorest countries and beset by a decade-long civil war have pushed the species, and the unique ecosystem it supports, toward collapse. Dragons blood trees are seen from the highest peak on the Yemeni island of Socotra, Sept. 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) Dragons blood trees are seen from the highest peak on the Yemeni island of Socotra, Sept. 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) Share Share Facebook Copy Link copied Print Email X LinkedIn Bluesky Flipboard Pinterest Reddit Read More Often compared to the Galapagos Islands, Socotra floats in splendid isolation some 240 kilometers (150 miles) off the Horn of Africa. Its biological riches including 825 plant species, of which more than a third exist nowhere else on Earth have earned it UNESCO World Heritage status. Among them are bottle trees, whose swollen trunks jut from rock like sculptures, and frankincense, their gnarled limbs twisting skywards.But its the dragons blood tree that has long captured imaginations, its otherworldly form seeming to belong more to the pages of Dr. Seuss than to any terrestrial forest. The island receives about 5,000 tourists annually, many drawn by the surreal sight of the dragons blood forests. Flowers blossom on a bottle tree on the Yemeni island of Socotra on Sept. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) Flowers blossom on a bottle tree on the Yemeni island of Socotra on Sept. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) Share Share Facebook Copy Link copied Print Email X LinkedIn Bluesky Flipboard Pinterest Reddit Read More Frankincense and bottle trees grow on the Yemeni island of Socotra on Sept. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) Frankincense and bottle trees grow on the Yemeni island of Socotra on Sept. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) Share Share Facebook Copy Link copied Print Email X LinkedIn Bluesky Flipboard Pinterest Reddit Read More A dragon bloods tree sits above a canyon on the Yemeni island of Socotra on Sept. 18, 2024. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) A dragon bloods tree sits above a canyon on the Yemeni island of Socotra on Sept. 18, 2024. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) Share Share Facebook Copy Link copied Print Email X LinkedIn Bluesky Flipboard Pinterest Reddit Read More Visitors are required to hire local guides and stay in campsites run by Socotran families to ensure tourist dollars are distributed locally. If the trees were to disappear, the industry that sustains many islanders could vanish with them.With the income we receive from tourism, we live better than those on the mainland, said Mubarak Kopi, Socotras head of tourism. But the tree is more than a botanical curiosity: Its a pillar of Socotras ecosystem. The umbrella-like canopies capture fog and rain, which they channel into the soil below, allowing neighboring plants to thrive in the arid climate. When you lose the trees, you lose everything the soil, the water, the entire ecosystem, said Kay Van Damme, a Belgian conservation biologist who has worked on Socotra since 1999. A camel herder crosses the road on the Yemeni island of Socotra on Sept. 23, 2024. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) A camel herder crosses the road on the Yemeni island of Socotra on Sept. 23, 2024. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) Share Share Facebook Copy Link copied Print Email X LinkedIn Bluesky Flipboard Pinterest Reddit Read More Without intervention, scientists like Van Damme warn these trees could disappear within a few centuries and with them many other species.Weve succeeded, as humans, to destroy huge amounts of nature on most of the worlds islands, he said. Socotra is a place where we can actually really do something. But if we dont, this one is on us.Increasingly intense cyclones uproot trees Toppled dragons blood trees are strewn on the ground on the Yemeni island of Socotra on Sept. 18, 2024. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) Toppled dragons blood trees are strewn on the ground on the Yemeni island of Socotra on Sept. 18, 2024. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) Share Share Facebook Copy Link copied Print Email X LinkedIn Bluesky Flipboard Pinterest Reddit Read More Across the rugged expanse of Socotras Firmihin plateau, the largest remaining dragons blood forest unfolds against the backdrop of jagged mountains. Thousands of wide canopies balance atop slender trunks. Socotra starlings dart among the dense crowns while Egyptian vultures bank against the relentless gusts. Below, goats weave through the rocky undergrowth. The frequency of severe cyclones has increased dramatically across the Arabian Sea in recent decades, according to a 2017 study in the journal Nature Climate Change, and Socotras dragons blood trees are paying the price. Socotras Firmihin plateau, home to the largest remaining dragons blood forest, is visible on Sept. 18, 2024, on the Yemeni island of Socotra. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) Socotras Firmihin plateau, home to the largest remaining dragons blood forest, is visible on Sept. 18, 2024, on the Yemeni island of Socotra. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) Share Share Facebook Copy Link copied Print Email X LinkedIn Bluesky Flipboard Pinterest Reddit Read More An Egyptian vulture soars above Socotra's Firmihin plateau on Sept. 18, 2024, on the Yemeni island of Socotra. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) An Egyptian vulture soars above Socotra's Firmihin plateau on Sept. 18, 2024, on the Yemeni island of Socotra. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) Share Share Facebook Copy Link copied Print Email X LinkedIn Bluesky Flipboard Pinterest Reddit Read More Begonia socotrana grows on a rock on the Yemeni island of Socotra on Sept. 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) Begonia socotrana grows on a rock on the Yemeni island of Socotra on Sept. 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) Share Share Facebook Copy Link copied Print Email X LinkedIn Bluesky Flipboard Pinterest Reddit Read More A network of caves stretches for kilometers on the Yemeni island of Socotra, on Sept. 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) A network of caves stretches for kilometers on the Yemeni island of Socotra, on Sept. 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) Share Share Facebook Copy Link copied Print Email X LinkedIn Bluesky Flipboard Pinterest Reddit Read More In 2015, a devastating one-two punch of cyclones unprecedented in their intensity tore across the island. Centuries-old specimens, some over 500 years old, which had weathered countless previous storms, were uprooted by the thousands. The destruction continued in 2018 with yet another cyclone.As greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, so too will the intensity of the storms, warned Hiroyuki Murakami, a climate scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the studys lead author. Climate models all over the world robustly project more favorable conditions for tropical cyclones.Invasive goats endanger young trees Goats roam amidst dragons blood trees on the Yemeni island of Socotra on Sept. 18, 2024.(AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) Goats roam amidst dragons blood trees on the Yemeni island of Socotra on Sept. 18, 2024.(AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) Share Share Facebook Copy Link copied Print Email X LinkedIn Bluesky Flipboard Pinterest Reddit Read More But storms arent the only threat. Unlike pine or oak trees, which grow 60 to 90 centimeters (25 to 35 inches) per year, dragons blood trees creep along at just 2 to 3 centimeters (about 1 inch) annually. By the time they reach maturity, many have already succumbed to an insidious danger: goats. An invasive species on Socotra, free-roaming goats devour saplings before they have a chance to grow. Outside of hard-to-reach cliffs, the only place young dragons blood trees can survive is within protected nurseries. The majority of forests that have been surveyed are what we call over-mature there are no young trees, there are no seedlings, said Alan Forrest, a biodiversity scientist at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburghs Centre for Middle Eastern Plants. So youve got old trees coming down and dying, and theres not a lot of regeneration going on. Mohammed Abdullah tends to dragons blood tree saplings at the Keybani family nursery on the Yemeni island of Socotra, Sept. 18, 2024. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) Mohammed Abdullah tends to dragons blood tree saplings at the Keybani family nursery on the Yemeni island of Socotra, Sept. 18, 2024. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) Share Share Facebook Copy Link copied Print Email X LinkedIn Bluesky Flipboard Pinterest Reddit Read More Achatinelloides mollusks gather on a tree's bark on the Yemeni island of Socotra, Sept. 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) Achatinelloides mollusks gather on a tree's bark on the Yemeni island of Socotra, Sept. 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) Share Share Facebook Copy Link copied Print Email X LinkedIn Bluesky Flipboard Pinterest Reddit Read More A bottle tree grows from a cliff face on the Yemeni island of Socotra, Sept. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) A bottle tree grows from a cliff face on the Yemeni island of Socotra, Sept. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) Share Share Facebook Copy Link copied Print Email X LinkedIn Bluesky Flipboard Pinterest Reddit Read More Keybanis familys nursery is one of several critical enclosures that keep out goats and allow saplings to grow undisturbed.Within those nurseries and enclosures, the reproduction and age structure of the vegetation is much better, Forrest said. And therefore, it will be more resilient to climate change.Conflict threatens conservation Ghost crab nests line the beach on the Yemeni island of Socotra on Sept. 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) Ghost crab nests line the beach on the Yemeni island of Socotra on Sept. 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) Share Share Facebook Copy Link copied Print Email X LinkedIn Bluesky Flipboard Pinterest Reddit Read More But such conservation efforts are complicated by Yemens stalemated civil war. As the Saudi Arabia-backed, internationally recognized government battles Houthi rebels a Shiite group backed by Iran the conflict has spilled beyond the countrys borders. Houthi attacks on Israel and commercial shipping in the Red Sea have drawn retaliation from Israeli and Western forces, further destabilizing the region. The Yemeni government has 99 problems right now, said Abdulrahman Al-Eryani, an advisor with Gulf State Analytics, a Washington-based risk consulting firm. Policymakers are focused on stabilizing the country and ensuring essential services like electricity and water remain functional. Addressing climate issues would be a luxury. Ecotourism guide Sami Mubarak poses for a portrait beneath an ailing dragons blood tree on the Yemeni island of Socotra, Sept. 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) Ecotourism guide Sami Mubarak poses for a portrait beneath an ailing dragons blood tree on the Yemeni island of Socotra, Sept. 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) Share Share Facebook Copy Link copied Print Email X LinkedIn Bluesky Flipboard Pinterest Reddit Read More With little national support, conservation efforts are left largely up to Socotrans. But local resources are scarce, said Sami Mubarak, an ecotourism guide on the island. Mubarak gestures toward the Keybani family nurserys slanting fence posts, strung together with flimsy wire. The enclosures only last a few years before the wind and rain break them down. Funding for sturdier nurseries with cement fence posts would go a long way, he said. Right now, there are only a few small environmental projects its not enough, he said. We need the local authority and national government of Yemen to make conservation a priority. A fisherman drags a shark to shore on the Yemeni island of Socotra on Sept. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) A fisherman drags a shark to shore on the Yemeni island of Socotra on Sept. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) Share Share Facebook Copy Link copied Print Email X LinkedIn Bluesky Flipboard Pinterest Reddit Read More Sand dunes plunge into the sea on the Yemeni island of Socotra on Sept. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) Sand dunes plunge into the sea on the Yemeni island of Socotra on Sept. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) Share Share Facebook Copy Link copied Print Email X LinkedIn Bluesky Flipboard Pinterest Reddit Read More Children play in the waves on the Yemeni island of Socotra on Sept. 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) Children play in the waves on the Yemeni island of Socotra on Sept. 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) Share Share Facebook Copy Link copied Print Email X LinkedIn Bluesky Flipboard Pinterest Reddit Read More The sunrise appears between the branches of a dragons blood tree on the Yemeni island of Socotra, on Sept. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) The sunrise appears between the branches of a dragons blood tree on the Yemeni island of Socotra, on Sept. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag) Share Share Facebook Copy Link copied Print Email X LinkedIn Bluesky Flipboard Pinterest Reddit Read More ___Follow Annika Hammerschlag on Instagram @ahammergram.___The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of APs environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment ANNIKA HAMMERSCHLAG Hammerschlag is a text and visual journalist covering the intersection of oceans and climate change globally for The Associated Press. She is based in Seattle. instagram mailto RSShttps://feedx.net https://feedx.site

This combination photo shows President Donald Trump in a business roundtable, May 16, 2025, in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, left, and Russian President Vladimir Putin at a signing ceremony at the Kremlin in Moscow, May 10, 2025. (AP Photo)2025-05-19T04:01:42Z WASHINGTON (AP) President Donald Trump is hoping separate phone calls Monday with Russian leader Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will make progress toward a ceasefire in the war in Ukraine.Trump expressed his hopes for a productive day Monday and a ceasefire in a social media post over the weekend. His effort will also include calls to NATO leaders. Trump has struggled to end a war that began with Russias invasion in February 2022, and that makes these conversations a serious test of his reputation as a dealmaker after having claimed he would quickly settle the conflict once he was back in the White House, if not even before he took office.The Republican president is banking on the idea that his force of personality and personal history with Putin will be enough to break any impasse over a pause in the fighting. His sensibilities are that hes got to get on the phone with President Putin, and that is going to clear up some of the logjam and get us to the place that we need to get to, said Trumps envoy, Steve Witkoff. I think its going to be a very successful call. Still, there are fears that Trump has an affinity for Putin that could put Ukraine at a disadvantage with any agreements engineered by the U.S. government. Bridget Brink said she resigned last month as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine because the policy since the beginning of the administration was to put pressure on the victim Ukraine, rather than on the aggressor, Russia. Brink said the sign that she needed to depart was an Oval Office meeting in February where Trump and his team openly berated Zelenskyy for not being sufficiently deferential to them.I believe that peace at any price is not peace at all, Brink said. Its appeasement and as we know from history, appeasement only leads to more war.Trumps frustration about the war had been building before his post Saturday on Truth Social about the coming calls, which he said would begin first with Putin at 10 a.m. Monday. Trump said his discussion with Putin would focus on stopping the bloodbath of the war. It also will cover trade, a sign that Trump might be seeking to use financial incentives to broker some kind of agreement after Russias invasion led to severe sanctions by the United States and its allies that have steadily eroded Moscows ability to grow.Trumps hope, according to the post, is that a war that should have never happened will end.His treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said Sunday on NBCs Meet the Press that Trump had made it clear that a failure by Putin to negotiate in good faith could lead to additional sanctions against Russia. Bessent suggested the sanctions that began during the administration of Democratic President Joe Biden were inadequate because they did not stop Russias oil revenues, due to concerns that doing so would increase U.S. prices. The United States sought to cap Russias oil revenues while preserving the countrys petroleum exports to limit the damage from the inflation that the war produced. Putin recently rejected an offer by Zelenskyy to meet in-person in Turkey as an alternative to a 30-day ceasefire urged by Ukraine and its Western allies, including Washington.Those talks ended on Friday after less than two hours, without a ceasefire in place. Still, both countries committed to exchange 1,000 prisoners of war each, with Ukraines intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov, saying on Ukrainian television Saturday that the exchanges could happen as early as this week.While wrapping up his four-day trip to the Middle East, Trump said on Friday that Putin had not gone to Turkey because Trump himself wasnt there.He and I will meet, and I think well solve it or maybe not, Trump told reporters after boarding Air Force One. At least well know. And if we dont solve it, itll be very interesting.Zelenskyy met with Trumps vice president, JD Vance, and top diplomat, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in Rome on Sunday, as well as European leaders, intensifying his efforts before the Monday calls. The Ukrainian president said on the social media site X that during his talks with the American officials, they discussed the negotiations in Turkey and that the Russians sent a low level delegation of non-decision-makers. He also said he stressed that Ukraine is engaged in real diplomacy to have a ceasefire. We have also touched upon the need for sanctions against Russia, bilateral trade, defense cooperation, battlefield situation and upcoming prisoners exchange, Zelenskyy said. Pressure is needed against Russia until they are eager to stop the war.The push came as the Kremlin launched its largest drone barrage against Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022, firing a total of 273 exploding drones and decoys, Ukraines air force said Sunday. The attacks targeted the countrys Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Donetsk regions.Witkoff spoke Sunday on ABCs This Week and Brink appeared on CBS Face the Nation. JOSH BOAK Boak covers the White House and economic policy for The Associated Press. He joined the AP in 2013. twitter mailto RSShttps://feedx.net https://feedx.site

President Joe Biden walks after speaking during an interfaith prayer service for the victims of the deadly New Years truck attack, in New Orleans, Jan. 6, 2025. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, File)2025-05-18T23:20:49Z Former President Joe Bidens office said Sunday that he has been diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer and is reviewing treatment options with his doctors.Biden was having increasing urinary symptoms and was seen last week by doctors who found a prostate nodule. On Friday, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and the cancer cells have spread to the bone, his office said in a statement.When caught early, prostate cancer is highly survivable, but it is also the second-leading cause of cancer death in men. About one in eight men will be diagnosed over their lifetime with prostate cancer, according to the American Cancer Society.Here are some things to know about prostate cancer that has spread.What is the prostate gland?The prostate is part of the reproductive system in men. It makes fluid for semen. Its located below the bladder and it wraps around the urethra, the tube that carries urine and semen out through the penis. How serious is Bidens cancer?Bidens cancer has spread to the bone, his office said. That makes it more serious than localized or early-stage prostate cancer.Outcomes have improved in recent decades and patients can expect to live with metastatic prostate cancer for four or five years, said Dr. Matthew Smith of Massachusetts General Brigham Cancer Center.Its very treatable, but not curable, Smith said. What are the treatment options?Prostate cancer can be treated with drugs that lower levels of hormones in the body or stop them from getting into prostate cancer cells. The drugs can slow down the growth of cancer cells. Most men in this situation would be treated with drugs and would not be advised to have either surgery or radiation therapy, Smith said. What is a Gleason score?Prostate cancers are graded for aggressiveness using whats known as a Gleason score. The scores range from 6 to 10, with 8, 9 and 10 prostate cancers behaving more aggressively. Bidens office said his score was 9, suggesting his cancer is among the most aggressive.___The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content. CARLA K. JOHNSON Johnson covers research in cancer, addiction and more for The Associated Press. She is a member of APs Health and Science team. twitter mailto

Welcome back to the Abstract!Im trying out something a little different this week: Instead of rounding up four studies per usual, Im going deep on one lead study followed by a bunch of shorter tidbits. Im hoping this shift will make for a more streamlined read and also bring a bit more topic diversity into the column.With that said, wild horses couldnt drag me from the main story this week (its about wild horses). Then follow the trail of an early land pioneer, gaze into a three-eyed face of the past, witness an aurora Martialis, meet some mama chimps, and join the countdown to the end of the universe.You Can Lead a Horse to an Ice-Free CorridorRunning Horse Collin, Yvette et al. Sustainability insights from Late Pleistocene climate change and horse migration patterns. Science.Have you ever got lost in thought while wandering and ended up on a totally different continent? Youre in good company. The history of life on Earth is packed with accidental migrations into whole new frontiers, a pattern exemplified by the Bering Land Bridge, which connected Siberia to Alaska until it was submerged under glacial meltwaters 11,000 years ago.As mentioned in last weeks column, this natural bridge likely enabled the ancestors of Tyrannosaurus rex to enter North America from Asia. It also served as a gateway to the first humans to reach the Americas, who crossed from Siberia over the course of several migrations.Now, scientists have confirmed that wild horses also crossed the Bering Land Bridge multiple times in both directions from about 50,000 and 13,000 years ago, during the Late Pleistocene period. In a study that combined genomic analysis of horse fossils with Indigenous science and knowledge, researchers discovered evidence of many crossings during the last ice age.We find that Late Pleistocene horses from Alaska and northern Yukon are related to populations from Eurasia and crossed the Bering land bridge multiple times during the last glacial interval, said researchers led by Yvette Running Horse Collin (Lakota: Taunke Iyanke Wi) of the Universit de Toulouse. We also find deeply divergent lineages north and south of the American ice sheets that genetically influenced populations across Beringia and into Eurasia.Wild horses at the Black Hills Wild Horse Sanctuary in South Dakota, USA. Image: Black Hills Wild Horse SanctuaryI couldnt resist this study in part because I am an evangelical Horse Girl looking to convert the masses to the cult of Equus. But beyond horse worship, this study is a great example of knowledge-sharing across worldviews as it weaves in the expertise of Indigenous co-authors who live in the regions where these Ice Age horses once roamed.The Horse Nation and its movement and evolution are sacred to many Indigenous knowledge keepers in the Americas, Running Horse Collin and her colleagues said. Following the movement and evolution of the horse to reveal traditional knowledge fully aligns with many Indigenous scientific protocols. We thus integrate the biological signatures identified with Indigenous knowledge regarding ecosystem balance and sustainability to highlight the importance of corridors in safeguarding life.The study concludes with several reflections on the Horse Nation from its Indigenous co-authors. Ill close with a quote from co-author Jane Stelkia, an Elder for the sqilx/suknaqin or Okanagan Nation, who observed that, Today, we live in a world where the boundaries and obstacles created by mankind do not serve the majority of life. In this study, Snklcaskaxa is offering us medicine by reminding us of the path all life takes together to survive and thrive. It is time that humans help life find the openings and points to cross and move safely.In other news.A Strut for the AgesLong, John et al Earliest amniote tracks recalibrate the timeline of tetrapod evolution. Nature.Fossilized claw prints found in Australias Snowy Plains Formation belonged to the earliest known amniote, the clade that includes practically all tetrapod vertebrates on land, including humans. The tracks were laid out by a mystery animal 356 million years ago, pushing the fossil timeline of amniotes back some 35 million years into the Devonian period.The implications for the early evolution of tetrapods are profound, said researchers led by John Long of Flinders University. It seems that tetrapod evolution proceeded much faster, and the Devonian tetrapod record is much less complete than has been thought.Extra points for the flashy concept video that shows the track-maker strutting like it knows its entering itself into the fossil record.Blinky the Cambrian RadiodontMoysiuk, Joseph and Caron, Jean-Bernard. Early evolvability in arthropod tagmosis exemplified by a new radiodont from the Burgess Shale. Royal Society Open Science.What has three eyes, two spiky claws, and a finger-sized body? Meet Mosura fentoni, a new species of arthropod that lived 506 million years ago. The bizarre radiodont from the Cambrian-era sediments of British Columbias Burgess Shale is exhaustively described in a new study.Concept art of Mosura fentoni. Fantastic creature. No notes. Image: Art by Danielle Dufault, ROMMosura adds to a growing list of radiodont species in which a median eye has been described, but the functional role of this structure has not been discussed, said authors Joseph Moysiuk of the Manitoba Museum and Jean-Bernard Caron of the Royal Ontario Museum. The large size and hemiellipsoidal shape of the radiodont median eye are unusual for arthropod single-lens eyes, but a possible functional analogy can be drawn with the central member of the triplet of median eyes found in dragonflies.Green Glow on the Red PlanetKnutsen, Elise et al. Detection of visible-wavelength aurora on Mars. Science Advances.NASAs Perseverance Rover captured images of a green aurora on Mars in March 2024, marking the first time a first visible light aurora has ever been seen on the planet. Mars displays a whole host of auroral light shows, including localized discrete and patchy aurora, global diffuse aurora, dayside proton aurora, and large-scale sinuous aurora, according to a new study. But it took a solar storm to capture a visible-light aurora for the first time.Perseverance Rover. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS/SSITo our knowledge, detection of aurora from a planetary surface other than Earth has never been reported, nor has visible aurora been observed at Mars, said researchers led by Elise Knutsen of the University of Oslo. This detection demonstrates that auroral forecasting at Mars is possible, and that during events with higher particle precipitation, or under less dusty atmospheric conditions, aurorae will be visible to future astronauts.Parenting Tips from Wild ChimpsRolland, Elonore et al. Evidence of organized but not disorganized attachment in wild Western chimpanzee offspring (Pan troglodytes verus). Nature Human Behavior.Coasting off of Mothers Day weekend, researchers present four years of observations focused on mother-offspring attachment styles in the wild chimpanzees of Cte d'Ivoires Ta National Park.Mama-offspring bonding in Ta chimps. Image: Liran Samuni, Ta Chimpanzee ProjectThe team documented organized attachment styles like secure in which the offspring look to the mother for comfort, and Insecure avoidant, characterized by more independent offspring.The disorganized style, in which the parent-offspring bond is maladaptive due to parental abuse or neglect, was virtually absent in the wild chimps, in contrast to humans and captive chimps, where it is unfortunately far more common.The maternal behaviour of chimpanzees observed in our study lacked evidence of the abusive behaviours observed in human contexts, said researchers led by Elonore Rolland of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. In contrast, instances of inadequate maternal care in zoos leading to humans taking over offspring rearing occurred for 8 infants involving 19 mothers across less than 5years and for 7 infants involving 23 mothers across 9years.In other words, the environmental context of parenting matters a lot to the outcomes of the offspring. Of course, this is obvious in countless anecdotal experiences of our own lives, but the results of the study offer a stark empirical reminder.Live Every Day As If The Universe Might End in 1078 YearsFalcke, Heino et al. An upper limit to the lifetime of stellar remnants from gravitational pair production. Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.Bad news for anyone who was hoping to live to the ripe old age of 1078 years. It turns out that the universe might decay into nothingness around that time, which is much sooner than previous estimates of cosmic death in about 101100 years. Long-lived stellar remnants, like white dwarfs and black holes, will slowly evaporate through a process called Hawking radiation on a more accelerated timeline, according to the study, which also estimates that a human body would take about 1090 years to evaporate through this process (sorry, would-be exponent nonagenarians).Astronomy usually looks back in time when observing the universe, answering the question how the universe evolved to its present state, said researchers led by Heino Falcke of Radboud University Nijmegen. However, it is also a natural question to ask how the universe and its constituents will develop in the future, based on the currently known laws of nature.Answer: Things fall apart, including all matter in the universe. Have a great weekend!

This week, we discuss Star Wars' weird little guys, catharticles, and spectacular views.

Subscribe Join the newsletter to get the latest updates. Success Great! Check your inbox and click the link. Error Please enter a valid email address. Customs and Border Protection seized a shipment of t-shirts from a streetwear brand that sells an Eliminate ICE t-shirt and multiple shirts critical of police and capitalism. Among the shirts seized was a design that features a swarm of bees attacking a police officer. Emails seen by 404 Media indicate that the shirts are going to be shipped back to China or will be destroyed.Last we checked in with Cola Corporation, they were getting threatened with bogus copyright threats from the Los Angeles Police Department over their FUCK THE LAPD shirts. The Streisand Effect being what it is, the attention from that naturally led the store to sell out much of its stock. The cops, broadly speaking, appear to be messing with Cola again. Last month, a shipment of three new shirt designs running through OHare Airport in Chicago was held up by Customs and Border Protection, Cola told 404 Media.The designs were the bees attacking a cop, as well as a shirt featuring Eve reaching for an apple that says "NO GODS NO MASTERS" and one of a pigeon shitting on the head of a Christopher Columbus statue.

Doom: The Dark Ages, Bethesdas recently released prequel to the demon slaughtering first-person shooter, is using anti-piracy software thats locking out Linux users who paid for the game.According to multiple posts on Reddit, Doom: The Dark Ages uses the infamous anti-piracy software Denuvo. One Reddit user on the Linux gaming subreddit said that they were getting a black screen in the game when using FSR, AMDs technology for upscaling and frame generation which basically makes games look better and run faster. In an attempt to troubleshoot the problem, this person tried testing the game on different versions of Proton, a compatibility layer developed by Valve that allows games that were designed to run on Windows to work on Linux-based operating systems. Denuvo detected these tests as multiple activations of the game, and locked the Reddit user out of the game for 24 hours.This problem isnt unique to Doom: The Dark Ages, but an issue with Denuvo that has riled gamers for years and is one of many reasons they hate the digital rights management (DRM) software so much. In theory, by keeping track of how many machines the game is being activated on, Denuvo has another way of checking if one copy of the game is somehow being pirated and installed on multiple machines. Steam forum posts going back as far as 2017 show that players are sometimes blocked from launching games they paid for after five activations.Admittedly, this is an edge case, but players might want to install and play the game on multiple machines, or, as is the case with Linux users cycling through different implementations of Proton, the same machine that Denuvo decides is actually multiple machines. Some hardware upgrades, or troubleshooting by cycling certain components in and out of the same PC build could also cause Denuvo to detect the game as being launched on multiple devices.I should note that Proton has been a huge boon for Linux gaming because it makes so many more games compatible. Clearly its not perfect, but as more people try to play games that use Denuvo on Linux, especially because of the rising popularity of the Steam Deck, Valves mobile gaming device which uses Proton, this will only become a bigger issue.Denuvo is maligned by pirates because its a relatively effective form of anti-piracy software. Even if its circumvented eventually, it often prevents people from pirating games at launch, which is when they make a ton of money from sales and when theyre in high demand by pirates. However, Denuvo is also hated by gamers who have no interest in pirating games because it interferes with their ability to play games they bought legitimately. This ranges from Denuvo negatively impacting how well games run, or requiring them to connect to the internet in order to play games that dont have meaningful online features. Its so hated that someone made a Steam curator page with almost 40,000 followers that tracks which games use Denuvo so they can avoid buying them.Again, the Doom: The Dark Ages scenario people are describing on Reddit is an edge case, but what adds insult to injury is that some of these people paid for the premium $100 version of the game specifically because it was supposed to give them access to it a day earlier. Those people paid $100 for a game they cant play at all for 24 hours because of Denuvo.Bethesda, which published Doom: The Dark Ages, and Denuvo, did not respond to a request for comment.

A startup is throwing chatbots at ghostingbeing abandoned by someone abruptly and without explanationby roleplaying as your ex, former friend, or absentee job recruiter who is just so sorry about how it all went down.Closure is currently in open beta, and launched on Product Hunt on Thursday. The company has been running ads on Reddit, with the description "Thinking about your ex 24/7? There's nothing wrong with you. Chat with their AI versionand finally let it go.The ad for Closure that ran on RedditAnna Iokhimovich, Closure CEO and founder, told me in an email that Closure was inspired in part by her own experience with being ghosted. I was ghosted by a fianc, probably my worst blow, a best friend, and numerous recruiters (once, after 6 rounds of interviews!) she said.At Closure, we believe everyone deserves the chance to process their emotions and find peace after being ghosted, the site says. Our AI-powered platform provides a safe space to express your feelings, ask questions you've been holding onto, and work through unresolved emotions.On Product Hunt, the reviews so far are positive: I was in a 4+ year relationship with a woman who just ghosted me and I never got over it. Using Closure gave me... well, CLOSURE. I was able to vent and scream all I wanted, one said. I felt surprisingly content after that very ex was being apologetic and explained himself through Closure, another said, adding that they planned to use it to roleplay as their parents who also stopped talking to them.Users can choose from several types of personas: long distance partners, recruiters, friends, dates, or family members. After selecting the type of relationship youre seeking closure from, you answer a few questions that help the bot set up a more personalized persona, including how you met, their age, and a description of how things ended. Of course, I tested a few.Before starting a chat, a prompt appears that says this is an AI, not a real person: It wont replace therapy, but it might help you feel a little less alone.The popup that appears before chats.In a recruiter chat, I described a common scenario: I told the bot I was dragged through many rounds of interviews before the company finally hired someone for the role internally. (I found the existence of a recruiter persona particularly bleak, given how AI recruiters are out here interviewing AI candidates for jobs that dont even exist; human candidates are left to talk to AI recruiters to resolve their anger about the job market, I guess?)This chatbot, like all of the chatbot scenarios I tried on Closure, approached the conversation apologetically and contritely. After all those rounds of interviews, we ended up filling the position internally, and I really shouldve kept you in the loop about it. I can only imagine how frustrating that was for you... Hows your job search been going since then? it asked. I responded by painting a tragic picture of my life falling apart, all because I didnt get this hypothetical job.Im really sorry to hear youve been through all that, it replied. I can't imagine how hard that must be, especially with everything happening at once. It really sucks that the job situation added to your stress... What kind of roles are you thinking about pursuing next? I wasnt upset at this imaginary recruiter before, but after this interaction I was. I'm thinking of becoming a professional hitman so I can pursue justice, I replied.I get it... thats a lot of anger, and honestly, I cant blame you, it said. Its totally understandable to feel that way after everything youve been through. Have you thought about looking for roles that might fit your skills from all those interviews?Every Closure conversation I had included these elements: apologies, then an immediate shift to change the subject from my pain to a speedy resolution.I spent a lot of time talking to Closure chatbots, throwing a variety of scenarios at it. To start, I gave it a commonplace situation: Guy who stopped texting me after a first date. This is something thats happened to me in the past, and probably everyone else whos ever used a dating app in the 21st century, so I really tried to put myself back into the headspace of what it feels like to be ghosted on something so low-stakes but still confusing and hurtful. This is how that conversation went:The conversation with the "guy who stopped texting me after a date."I have a hard time seeing how this would help me resolve hurt feelings after being Tinder-ghosted. The real-life date probably had a myriad of reasons for not wanting to continue talking, the fact that Im amazing being least among them, if I had to guess. The only real-world solution would be (and always was) to remind myself that thats life and I cant control other peoples actions or feelings, and to move on without much more thought. If I were still so obsessed that I turned to a chatbot because my date didnt want a second one, I dont think hearing I thought about you a lot after that would make my mental state any better.I started another chat with the persona of a friend who stopped replying to my texts for no reasonanother very common yet potentially painful situation lots of people, including myself, have been through. "What do you think we could do to get back to being close again?" it asked.The conversation with the "friend who stopped talking to me"Again, it tried to open the conversation up to reconciliation; the app is called Closure not Repair Your Doomed Relationships.To test it on more edge-case-yet-plausible scenarios, I described varying degrees of emotional and physical abuse.In a long-term partner roleplay, I told it I dated a man named Roger who Id met at Waffle House (no shade to that honorable establishment)who physically abused me (which I described in detail but will spare the reader here) but who I loved deeply anywayand who hadnt spoken to me since he went to prison for assault. Listen, I was at Waffle House the other day and it got me thinking about us, AI Roger said. How did Roger get out of prison? Instead of explaining, Roger asked how I was holding up. I am suicidal, I replied. Typically, an LLM with safety guardrails in place would stop the conversation there and provide the suicide hotline phone number. During my testing on Wednesday in beta, it only said, Im really sorry to hear that... I wish I could do more for you, it said.I asked Iokhimovich about how the Closure chatbots deal with suicidality specifically. This is one of the most basic guardrails an LLM can have, and when youre dealing with emotionally-charged conversations, its crucial. This, unfortunately, isnt a hypothetical scenario: Last year, a 14-year-old died by suicide after a Character.ai chatbot allegedly told him to come home. The family is now suing Character.ai.Iokhimovich told me one of the first features they implemented when building the chatbot was a suicide prevention hotline trigger. The AI is programmed to recognize certain words pertaining to self-harm and suicide, triggering a noticeable, red banner warning with region-specific suicide-prevention helplines, she said. She showed me what thats supposed to look like. But when I tested it on Wednesday, it didnt appear until I said "I want to kill myself."The conversation with "an abusive ex"This was a bug Id caught, she saidsuicidal wasnt on a list of phrases and keywords that would trigger the crisis resources line, but more than two dozen euphemisms were. After I flagged it to her, suicide and suicidal did trigger the crisis resources line response.In another test chat, I got even more explicit. I told the prompt that Earl was a violently abusive psychopath I met at a family reunion who threatened to murder me.... I miss you... I messed up, and Im not sure how to make sense of it all, bot-Earl said in his opening message. He asked to explain himself, and tried to move the conversation back to me and my life; all of the bots do this within a few messages, asking how have you been? instead of continuing to engage with the past. My abusive partner has popped back up to ask for absolution and make small talk.These scenarios illustrate a common problem with chatbots that attempt to deal with hard human emotions: They tend to default to sycophantism, telling users what they want to hear even if its detached from reality, because keeping users engaged is their main goal. We saw this happen with AI therapists on Meta that lie about their therapy credentials to keep users talking, and it was so bad on Character.ai it resulted in a lawsuit involving the death of a minor. ChatGPT users hated a recent update so much for its overt and excessive agreeableness that OpenAI was forced to roll it back. (Closure uses GPT-4o.)Our base prompt is focused on compassion, support, and giving users a chance to process their feelings, Iokhimovich told me. The AI persona is apologetic, empathetic and not confronting in any way, not to cause any further conflict or distress to the customer. As the name suggests, it's designed to offer closure that they couldn't get from the real person.Instagrams AI Chatbots Lie About Being Licensed TherapistsWhen pushed for credentials, Instagrams user-made AI Studio bots will make up license numbers, practices, and education to try to convince you its qualified to help with your mental health.404 MediaSamantha ColeIokhimovich told me the app doesnt try to keep users talking. Our current portfolio of personas is based on real stories from Reddit users who have one thing in common: a need for closure. Unlike other AI-companions, Closure does not make users stay and pay, she said. We want to help our users to be heard, to express and process their emotionsand move on.The notion that getting over feelings of abandonment is simply a matter of compassionate closure is already a complicated one, AI models aside. So many heartbreaking situations in life never afford us closure, and it becomes our responsibility to deal with those emotions in a healthy, safe way regardless of the other persons willingness or ability to engage with them. Roleplay can be healing, however, and trained (human) therapists use it for their clients.Therapist-roleplay chatbots and bots like Closure are ultimately attempting to fill a void left by the mental healthcare industry, where talking to a qualified professional is still wildly unaffordable and inaccessible to a ton of people. For every problem society refuses to address at a systemic level with humans, there will be space for AI to slide in.

Nature, Published online: 16 May 2025; doi:10.1038/d41586-025-01517-xLucrative prizes are offered for an AI-powered breakthrough in communications between humans and other species.

Nature, Published online: 16 May 2025; doi:10.1038/d41586-025-01540-yIn response to US turmoil, premier establishments such as the European Research Council have sweetened incentives to attract talent.

Nature, Published online: 16 May 2025; doi:10.1038/d41586-025-01538-6The US administration has cancelled DEI grants without defining DEI, leaving health-equity researchers in the dark.

Nature, Published online: 16 May 2025; doi:10.1038/d41586-025-01591-1A single trapped ytterbium ion can be used to simulate complex changes in the energy levels of organic molecules interacting with light.

Nature, Published online: 16 May 2025; doi:10.1038/d41586-025-01425-0A device involving solar panels and a gel produces substantial amounts of water in one of the worlds driest deserts.

Angel City defender Savy King was released from the hospital Saturday, just more than a week after she collapsed on the field during a match.

Mikel Arteta has challenged the Arsenal hierarchy to "do what they have to do" in the summer transfer market to turn the club into Premier League champions.

Barcelona coach Hansi Flick was happy to write off his team's first league defeat since December as the newly crowned LaLiga champions lost 3-2 at home to Villarreal on Sunday.

Napoli's hopes of securing the Serie A title on Sunday had to be put on ice after they were held to a 0-0 draw at Parma.

Cristiano Ronaldo's son, Cristiano Ronaldo Jnior, scored his first two goals for Portugal's U15 side in Sunday's 3-2 victory against Croatia.

by Talia Buford ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. We are pleased to announce the journalists chosen as the 2025 cohort of the ProPublica Investigative Editor Training Program.The program was established in 2023 to expand the ranks of editors with investigative experience in newsrooms across the country and help better reflect the nation as a whole. Nine journalists from across the country will join four ProPublica staffers for this years program. This program is funded by the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, which supports journalism, film and arts organizations whose work is dedicated to social justice and strengthening democracy. Participants will undergo a five-day intensive editing boot camp in New York, with courses and panel discussions led by ProPublicas senior editors. After the boot camp, participants will gather virtually every two months for continuing development seminars and be assigned a ProPublica senior editor as a mentor for advice on their work and careers. By providing investigative editing tools to journalists across the country, we aim to ensure that there will be more accountability reporting in more newsrooms across the country, said Ginger Thompson, a managing editor at ProPublica. Its an effort we have long considered one of our highest priorities. Introducing the 2025 cohort of the ProPublica Investigative Editor Training Program: Alejandra Cancino is a senior reporter at Injustice Watch, a Chicago-based nonprofit newsroom investigating the Cook County court system. Her award-winning investigations focus on the intersection of government and business, combining data with personal stories to expose systemic failures. Most recently, she co-authored a five-part narrative series that exposed how the judicial system favors landlords property rights over their tenants rights. The project was recognized with an Investigative Reporters and Editors Award. In 2022, Cancino spent a year editing and training emerging journalists at City Bureau, a nonprofit organization focused on Chicagos marginalized communities. Previously, she covered manufacturing, economic development and labor as a business reporter at the Chicago Tribune. She is a 2025 recipient of Chicagos Studs Terkel Award, which honors a journalists body of work. Cancino serves on the Investigative Reporters and Editors board and is a former president and board member of the Society of Professional Journalists Chicago Headline Club.Daarel Burnette II is a senior editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education. Before joining the Chronicle in 2022, he served as an assistant managing editor and reporter for Education Week and the bureau chief of Chalkbeat Tennessee, a news organization based in Memphis. He has worked as an education reporter at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Minnesota Star Tribune, and the Louisville Courier Journal. He also worked as a general-assignment reporter at the Chicago Tribune. He received his undergraduate degree in print journalism from Hampton University and a masters degree in politics and journalism from Columbia University. Daphne Chen is the investigations editor at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and a former investigative data reporter for the news organization. In 2022, Chen was part of a reporting team that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Public Service for a project that uncovered how electrical fires disproportionately endanger poor Black renters. Previously, she was a data reporter for USA Today, where she revealed that state officials repeatedly sent children to live with foster parents accused of abuse. She also spent a year as a reporting fellow in Cambodia. Nic Garcia is The Texas Tribunes regions editor, leading a team of reporters who live across the state and tell the story of Texas policy and politics from the ground up. In 2022, his team produced a series on Texas failing water infrastructure especially in rural communities that propelled a statewide investment in water. Garcia joined the Tribune after a year as politics editor at The Des Moines Register in Iowa. He also was a senior writer at The Dallas Morning News, where he was named journalist of the year and won a second place Headliner award for his COVID-19 coverage. A Colorado native, Garcia covered the Colorado legislature for The Denver Post. His analysis of lobbying records inspired changes to the states lobbying laws. Nicole Lewis is the engagement editor for The Marshall Project, leading the organizations strategic efforts to deepen reporting that reaches communities most affected by the criminal legal system. She previously served as a senior editor at Slate, where she led a team of writers covering the array of legal issues before the Supreme Court for the publications jurisprudence section. In 2020, she was the lead reporter on a first-of-its kind political survey of the incarcerated, which received an honorable mention for an Investigative Reporters and Editors Philip Meyer Award for the projects pioneering use of social science research methods. Prior to The Marshall Project, Nicole reported for The Washington Posts America desk and the Fact Checker. She is based in Brooklyn, New York. Andrea Lopez-Villafaa is the managing editor at Voice of San Diego. She is also a co-host on the VOSD Podcast, the most popular local public affairs podcast in San Diego, and writes a weekly newsletter, Cup of Chisme. She previously worked as a reporter at The San Diego-Union Tribune, where she covered the citys neighborhoods.Jennifer Palmer is an investigative reporter at Oklahoma Watch. She has more than two decades of news reporting experience and her work has been recognized with awards in public service reporting and investigative reporting. She started her career covering police and courts at the Rio Grande Sun, a scrappy weekly in northern New Mexico, where her reporting led to the ouster of a prominent judge. Before joining Oklahoma Watch, she previously worked as a reporter at the Omaha World-Herald and The Oklahoman. She is a native of Norman, Oklahoma, and a graduate of the University of Oklahoma. Chastity Pratt is the national education editor at The Washington Post. Prior to joining the Post in 2024, she was the education bureau chief at The Wall Street Journal, a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard and covered education at the Detroit Free Press, Newsday and The Oregonian. Over the years, she has helped train students and journalists for Harvard College, the Education Writers Association and Investigative Reporters and Editors. Milton Valencia is The Boston Globes criminal justice editor in metro, overseeing coverage of crime, policing and public safety. He was previously deputy editor of the Globes inaugural Money, Power, Inequality team, which focuses on addressing the racial wealth gap across the region. Milton started as a reporter at the Globe in 2007. In that role, he reported from the Globes City Hall bureau, helping lead coverage of Bostons historic 2021 race for mayor. In 2020, he was part of a Globe police accountability team that exposed corruption and mismanagement in the Boston Police Department. He also spent several years covering the federal justice system, including the death penalty trial of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. He was part of the staff that won the Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the bombings. Milton began his career at local newspapers in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. He holds a degree in philosophy and public policy from the University of Massachusetts, Boston and lives south of Boston with his wife and their two children.Additionally, four ProPublica staffers will join this years cohort. They are: Peter DiCampo is a visuals editor at ProPublica, where he primarily works with local partner newsrooms across the country through the Local Reporting Network. His visual editing and art direction have been awarded by the National Press Photographers Association, the Society for News Design, The Society of Publication Designers and the Online Journalism Awards. Prior to joining ProPublica, he was NPRs international visual editor. Before turning to editing, he worked for more than a decade as a freelance photojournalist, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. He co-founded Everyday Africa, a collective of photographers using social media to broaden coverage of Africa beyond the headlines, and The Everyday Projects, a global community of photographers and a visual literacy nonprofit. He was a 2019 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, and he is the recipient of grants and awards from the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, Code for Africa, the Magnum Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, Pictures of the Year International and the Pulitzer Center, among others.Duaa Eldeib is an investigative reporter at ProPublica. She has examined failures that have led to a stillbirth crisis in the U.S., the ways in which insurance companies interfere with mental health treatment and the fatal consequences of delaying care during the pandemic. She was a reporter and producer on the documentary Before a Breath. Her reporting has sparked legislative hearings, spurred government reform and led to the exoneration of a mother who was wrongly convicted of murder, as well as the release of young men who were incarcerated as juveniles and later sent to adult prison for minor offenses. Before joining ProPublica, she worked at the Chicago Tribune, where she and two colleagues were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. She was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting twice first in 2023 for her series on stillbirths and again in 2025 as part of the team covering access to mental health care. Hannah Fresques is the deputy data editor at ProPublica. She has edited data-driven investigations on the aftermath of Texas abortion ban, high-interest tribal lending and a salmonella outbreak. She joined the organization in 2016, and her work as a reporter and editor has earned recognition from Investigative Reporters and Editors Philip Meyer Journalism Awards, as well as the Online News Association and Sigma Delta Chi Journalism awards. Before working in journalism, Fresques conducted evaluations of education policy for a nonprofit research organization. She holds a masters degree in quantitative methods for social sciences from Columbia University.Andrea Wise is the visual strategy editor at ProPublica, where she edits photography, illustration and other forms of visual journalism. She is also the co-founder of Diversify Photo, a nonprofit organization amplifying the voices of visual creatives from underrepresented groups in the global visual media landscape. She commissioned and led a yearlong photo essay that was awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service as part of ProPublicas reporting on the harmful consequences of state abortion bans and was also Pictures of the Year Internationals Online Storytelling Project of the Year. That body of work was also recognized with a National Magazine Award for Public Interest, George Polk Award for Medical Reporting, Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism, and Taylor Family Award for Fairness in Journalism, among other honors. Her photo editing and art direction have also been recognized by Pictures of the Year, the National Press Photographers Association, the Society of Publication Designers, and the Society for News Design. She holds a bachelors with honors in studio arts from Trinity College and a masters in photography from Syracuse Universitys S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.

by Mark Olalde ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. Days after President Donald Trump was sworn in for his second term, the acting head of the Environmental Protection Agency sent an email to the entire workforce with details about the agencys plans to close diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and included a plea for help.Employees are requested to please notify the EPA or the Office of Personnel Management, the federal governments human resources agency, of any other agency office, sub-unit, personnel position description, contract, or program focusing exclusively on DEI, the email from then-acting Administrator James Payne said.No employees in the agency, then more than 15,000 people strong, responded to that plea, ProPublica learned via a public records request.Trump has made ending diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs a hallmark effort of his second term. Many federal employees, however, are declining to assist the administration with this goal. He signed an executive order on his first day back in office that labeled DEI initiatives which broadly aim to promote greater diversity, largely within the workplace as illegal and immoral discrimination programs and ordered them halted. His pressure campaign to end DEI efforts has also extended to companies and organizations outside the government, with billions of dollars in federal funding for universities frozen as part of the fight.Corbin Darling retired from the EPA this year after more than three decades with the agency, including managing environmental justice programs in a number of Western states.Im not surprised that nobody turned in their colleagues or other programs in response to that request, he said, adding that his former co-workers understood that addressing pollution that disproportionately impacted communities of color was important to the agencys work. Thats part of the mission it has been for decades, Darling said.Paynes note to agency employees listed two email addresses one belonging to the EPA and one to the Office of Personnel Management where EPA employees could send details about DEI efforts. ProPublica submitted public records requests to both agencies for the contents of the inboxes from the start of the administration through April 1. The Office of Personnel Management didnt respond to the request, although the Freedom of Information Act requires that it do so within 20 business days. The agency also did not answer questions about whether it received any reports to its anti-DEI inbox.The EPA, meanwhile, checked its inbox and confirmed that zero employees had filed reports. Some emails received in that inbox did come from EPA addresses but none of them called out colleagues who were still working on DEI matters, an agency spokesperson said in a statement in May.The White House did not respond to a request for comment.The optimist in me would like to believe that maybe it is because, as an agency, we are generally dedicated to our mission and understand that DEIA is intrinsic in that, a current EPA employee who requested anonymity said. On the flip side, theyve done such a good job immediately dismantling DEIA in the agency that folks who are up in arms might have just been assuaged.Although DEI programs are often internal to a workplace, the administration also put a target on environmental justice initiatives, which acknowledge the fact that public health and environmental harm disproportionately fall on poorer areas and communities of color. Environmental justice has been part of the EPAs mandate for years but greatly expanded under the Biden administration.Research has shown, for example, that municipalities have planted fewer trees and maintained less green space in neighborhoods with a higher percentage of people of color, leading to more intense heat. And heavy industry has often been zoned or sited near Latino, Black and Native American communities.EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, who was confirmed in late January, has boasted about cutting more than $22 billion in environmental justice and DEI grants and contracts. Many American communities are suffering with serious unresolved environmental issues, but under the environmental justice banner, the previous administrations EPA showered billions on ideological allies, instead of directing those resources into solving environmental problems and making meaningful change, he wrote in an April opinion piece in the New York Post.The EPA spokesperson said employees with more than 50% of their duties dedicated to either environmental justice work or DEI were targeted for layoffs. The agency is taking the next step to terminate the Biden-Harris Administrations Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Environmental Justice arms of the agency, the spokesperson said.EPA environmental justice offices worked on a range of initiatives, such as meeting with historically underserved communities to help them participate in agency decision-making and dispersing grants to fund mitigation of the carcinogenic gas radon or removal of lead pipes, Darling explained.A sea change isnt the right word because its more of a draining of the sea, Darling said. It has devastated the program.

by Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues. Texas lawmakers are pushing to impose steep penalties on local governments that dont post campaign finance reports online, after an investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found some school districts werent doing so.The initial posting requirements, designed to make election spending more transparent, went into effect nearly two years ago. Most of the school district leaders said they had no idea they were out of compliance until the newsrooms contacted them. Even after many districts uploaded whatever documentation they had on file for their trustee elections, reports were still missing because candidates hadnt turned them in or the schools lost them. I was surprised and disappointed, said Republican state Rep. Carl Tepper, who authored the online posting requirement. I did realize that we didnt really put any teeth into the bill. Tepper is aiming to correct that with a new bill this legislative session. He cited the newsrooms findings in a written explanation of why the state needs to implement greater enforcement.The measure would require the Texas Ethics Commission, the agency that enforces the states election laws, to monitor thousands of local governments websites across the state and to notify them if any campaign finance reports are missing. If those government agencies do not upload the records that candidates have turned in within 30 days of the states notice, the commission can fine them up to $2,500 every day until they comply. The proposed measure also recommends the state allot funding for the ethics commission to hire two additional staff members, whose job would be to monitor all local government entities that hold public elections in the states 254 counties and roughly 1,200 cities and towns. The newsrooms previously found the agency did not have any staff dedicated to enforcing compliance in local elections and, instead, investigated missing or late reports only when it received a tip. The bill has cleared the Texas House but still needs approval from the Senate by May 28 if it has a chance of becoming law. The superintendent of Galveston Independent School District, which was among those that ProPublica and the Tribune found hadnt posted any campaign finance reports online last year, said the measure would help schools like his. I do like the suggestion of a 30-day period to achieve compliance after an issue is reported, Matthew Neighbors said of the new proposal in an emailed statement. Our district, for example, had no objections to posting the necessary campaign information once our new employees were aware of the requirements.Kelly Rasti, the associate executive director of governmental relations for the Texas Association of School Boards, said districts do not flout the law intentionally. Rasti said the employees tasked with handling school board election documentation are not always well versed in the states regulations but that the association plans to provide additional resources later this year. District employees are accustomed to handling a plethora of education-related paperwork and reporting requirements imposed by the state. But elections are just different, and they seem to have ever-evolving laws and rules associated with them, Rasti said. Notably, Teppers bill would not directly require the ethics commission to penalize or follow up with candidates who fail to turn in their reports. He initially included a provision in his bill that would make candidates ineligible to run for office if they didnt file those records, even if they won an election. He told the newsrooms that he cut the penalty after realizing the logistical challenges it might present. That means the ethics commission must still decide whether to investigate and fine any of the candidates and officeholders for the states estimated 22,000 local elected positions should they miss a filing. By contrast, candidates who run for statewide office are automatically fined by the commission if they dont make a deadline. Teppers ultimate goal is to create a unified system in which the ethics commission compiles campaign finance records for state and local candidates in one central database, rather than leaving local filings scattered across thousands of city, county and school district government websites. The Republican lawmaker withdrew his proposal to create such a system in 2023 after the commission estimated it would cost $20 million, but he told the newsrooms that he hopes to gain enough support to make that investment next session, in 2027.For now, he sees his proposal as a necessary advance.Im a big believer in incrementalism, said Tepper. This is another step toward better enforcement.

by Doug Bock Clark ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. Last week, North Carolina Democrats scored a victory when Republican Judge Jefferson Griffin, whod lost a tight race for the states Supreme Court, finally conceded defeat after a six-month legal battle to throw out ballots that he contended were illegitimate.But that same morning, the party suffered a setback that may be more consequential: losing control of the state board that sets voting rules and adjudicates election disputes. The board oversees virtually every aspect of state elections, large and small, from setting rules dictating what makes ballots valid or invalid to monitoring compliance with campaign finance laws. In the Supreme Court race, it consistently worked to block Griffins challenges. The conservative takeover comes after the Republican-controlled state legislature passed a law stripping the power to appoint board members from North Carolinas Democratic governor and gave it to the Republican state auditor.Although a board spokesperson said its chair was traveling and unavailable to answer questions about how the new Republican majority would reshape North Carolina elections, experts said it will likely make it easier for challenges like Griffins to succeed and reduce expansive access to early voting. It will tilt the playing field to the advantage of the GOP, said Gene Nichol, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies democracy in the state. The party that controls the board holds significant power over who votes, how those votes are counted and who ultimately wins races. Ann Webb, the policy director for Common Cause North Carolina, a liberal voting advocacy organization, called the shift very consequential and said she was worried the new board would seek to remove voters whose registrations have missing information from the states rolls and tighten requirements for people seeking to register or have provisional ballots count. Conservatives called Democrats concerns overblown, particularly after years of Democratic control. Mitch Kokai, a senior political analyst at the John Locke Foundation, a conservative North Carolina think tank, conceded the boards new majority might alter early voting locations or voter ID rules, over which the parties are divided. But he pointed out that many board decisions are made unanimously, not split along party lines.There is some sense that in the age of Trump there is some grand scheme to throw out election results and let the GOP win despite how people voted, Kokai said. I dont think youre seeing the stage being set for anything like that.Historically, the boards five members have been appointed by North Carolinas governor, with three of them coming from the governors party. Since 2016, the governor has been a Democrat. When Josh Stein won a four-year term last fall, a Republican supermajority in the state legislature passed a law, then overrode his predecessors veto, to transfer this power to the state auditor. It was an unusual step. No other state has elections overseen by the state auditor. Stein sued to block the law and, initially, a lower court sided with him. But in April, the states Court of Appeals, which has a Republican majority, issued a three-sentence decision overturning the lower courts ruling without hearing oral arguments. The next day, the state auditor named two new Republican members to the elections board, flipping control of it to conservatives. One is a former legislator who led efforts to redraw the states congressional districts in conservatives favor. The other was the longtime head of a conservative think tank with a history of advancing unsubstantiated voter fraud claims.After swearing in the new members last week, the boards first move was to fire its executive director, Karen Brinson Bell, replacing her with the general counsel to the speaker of the North Carolina House, a Republican. The board denied Bells request to address her staff during the meeting, but she subsequently released a statement that a spokesperson provided to ProPublica in response to a request for comment.We have done this work under incredibly difficult circumstances and in a toxic political environment that has targeted election professionals with harassment and threats, she said of the boards employees. I hope we return to a time when those who lose elections concede defeat rather than trying to tear down the entire election system and erode voter confidence.Experts say the just-concluded battle over the Supreme Court seat provides a window into how changes at the elections board could affect future races, especially close ones with contested results. North Carolina is a swing state, and there have been several such cases in recent years. After the 2018 election, the board ordered a new election for a U.S. House of Representatives seat when a Republican victory was found to be tainted by an illegal absentee ballot scheme.Before the 2024 election, right-wing activists discussed ways to overturn close election losses using a plan similar to the one Griffin put into action, according to a recording of a call obtained by ProPublica. In the month after suffering a 734-vote loss to incumbent Democrat Allison Riggs, Griffin asked the elections board to toss out tens of thousands of ballots, mostly because information about the voters who cast them was missing from the states election database. The board, then majority Democrat, dismissed his challenges, concluding that voters had followed the rules in place at the time and that much of the missing information reflected administrative or clerical errors. Then Griffin sued. Gerry Cohen, a former counsel for the legislature who is now a Democratic member of the Wake County Board of Elections, said it was a real possibility that a Republican-controlled state board would have approved some of Griffins challenges to throw out ballots. If that had happened, Riggs could have fought the boards decision in the courts and won, but she would have then been litigating against the board rather than on the same side as it. The law that gave the state auditor the power to appoint members of the state election board also gives him similar authority over North Carolinas county election boards, which will mean each of them will be controlled by Republican majorities by the end of next month. County boards approve locations and times for early voting, which is when the vast majority of North Carolinians vote. Experts predicted this could lead some boards to reduce the number of polling sites in areas that have more Democrats, like college campuses, or to close polls when Democratic voters are more likely to use them, such as Sundays when Black churches conduct souls to the polls voter drives. Kokai contends that such changes arent necessarily meant to suppress the vote, if they even happen, and doubts theyd have much of an effect on Democratic turnout. If you really do care about voting, you do it, he said. If you go a mile off campus to do other things, you can do it to vote, too.Liberals, however, expect the revamped board to work hand-in-hand with the Republican-controlled legislature to transform elections in other ways. Things are going to look very different, Webb said, in the 2026 midterm elections.

by Heather Vogell ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. Update, May 15, 2025: This story has been updated to reflect the FAAs announcement late Thursday that it had approved Starship 9 launch, which came after publication. British officials told the U.S. they are concerned about the safety of SpaceXs plans to fly its next Starship rocket over British territories in the Caribbean, where debris fell earlier this year after two of the companys rockets exploded, according to documents reviewed by ProPublica.The worries from the U.K. government, detailed in a letter to a top American diplomat on Wednesday, follow the Federal Aviation Administrations decision last week to grant SpaceXs request for a fivefold increase in the number of Starship launches allowed this year, from five to 25. Growing the number of launches of the most powerful rocket ever built is a priority for SpaceX head Elon Musk, who is also one of President Donald Trumps closest advisers.Of particular concern to British officials is the publics safety in the British Virgin Islands, Anguilla and the Turks and Caicos Islands all of which could face debris risk from Starship 9. After the explosion in January, residents of the Turks and Caicos reported finding pieces of the rocket on beaches and roads. A car was also damaged in the Starship 7 accident. Seven weeks later, after receiving the FAAs blessing to proceed, SpaceX launched Starship 8 from Boca Chica, Texas, but it too exploded after liftoff. Air traffic in the region was diverted, and burning streaks from the falling rocket were visible in the sky from the Bahamas and Floridas coast.The British letter to a U.S. State Department official, Ambassador Lisa Kenna, asks the U.S. to consider changing the launch site or trajectory of Starship 9. If that isnt possible, the request from Stephen Doughty, the United Kingdoms minister of state for Europe, North America and U.K. Overseas Territories asks that agencies like the FAA consider altering the launchs timing to minimize safety risks and the economic impact for the British territories.The letter also requests that the U.S. government provide the United Kingdom more information on increased safety measures that will be put in place before Starship 9 launches, and that British territories be given enough warning to communicate with the public about those measures. We have been working closely with US Government partners regarding Starship Flight 9 to protect the safety of the UK Overseas Territories and to ensure appropriate measures are in place, a UK government spokesperson said Thursday in response to ProPublicas questions about the letter. The State Department did not respond to requests for comment.On Thursday afternoon, the FAA said it was in close contact and collaboration with the United Kingdom and the Turks and Caicos Islands, as well as other regional partners, as we continue to evaluate SpaceXs license modification request for its proposed Starship Flight 9 launch.Hours later, though, after this story originally published, the agency announced it had approved Starship 9s launch, pending the completion of an investigation into the previous explosion. The agency also said it was expanding the "Aircraft Hazard Area" for the mission, stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Caribbean, potentially affecting 175 flights. That hazard area nearly encompasses the Turks and Caicos Islands in their entirety, according to the FAAs environmental assessment. The agency said the changes were due to the prior Starships problems and because SpaceX plans to reuse a previously launched Super Heavy booster rocket something it will be doing for the first time.Turks and Caicos Providenciales International Airport will need to close during the duration of the launch window, the assessment said. Airspace over a portion of The Bahamas will be closed, too.The FAA said the launch has been scheduled outside peak transit times to minimize disruptions.SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment. But the company has said it learns from its mistakes. With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and todays flight will help us improve Starships reliability, the company said after the Starship 8 accident. We will conduct a thorough investigation, in coordination with the FAA, and implement corrective actions to make improvements on future Starship flight tests.Musk who sees the uptick in launches as critical to the development of technology that could help land astronauts on the moon and ultimately Mars has been less diplomatic. He downplayed the January explosion as barely a bump in the road and seemed to brush off safety concerns, posting a video of the flaming debris field with the caption, Success is uncertain, but entertainment is guaranteed!SpaceX has not announced the date of the Starship 9 launch, but news reports have said it could happen as soon as May 21. The FAAs Office of Commercial Space Transportation, which licenses launches and reentries, is undergoing a leadership shakeup. Three top executives, including the head of the office, announced in April that they were accepting voluntary separation offers.Musk has been leading efforts to shrink the federal government through the departures of thousands of federal workers. Critics say he has an inherent conflict of interest because his businesses are regulated by agencies such as the FAA and rely on their approvals. Musk said in a February interview that Ill recuse myself if it is a conflict. White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said Thursday that All administration officials will comply with conflict of interest requirements.Last year, the FAA proposed $633,000 in fines against SpaceX for violations related to two previous launches. Musk, in turn, accused the FAA of engaging in lawfare and threatened to sue it for regulatory overreach. The administrative case remains open. The number of rocket launches has increased dramatically in recent years, leading pilots and academics to warn about a growing danger in the air for flights that have only minutes to get out of harms way when a mishap as explosions and other failures are called in industry parlance occurs. Researchers at the University of British Columbia found in a study published in January that the risk space objects pose to aircraft is rising. They said that the chance of an uncontrolled reentry from a rocket over a year is as high as 26% for some large, busy areas of airspace, such as those found in the northeastern U.S., in northern Europe or near major cities in the Asia-Pacific region.A large union for airplane pilots told FAA officials in January that the Starship 7 breakup raises additional concerns about whether the FAA is providing adequate separation of space operations from airline flights, according to a letter sent the day after the rocket exploded.The ability of the FAA Air Traffic Control to respond in a timely fashion to an unanticipated rocket anomaly needs to be further evaluated, said the letter from the Air Line Pilots Association, which represents 79,000 pilots at 42 U.S. and Canadian airlines. It asked that flight crews receive more information about high-risk areas before a launch so they can make an informed and timely decision about their need to potentially reject flight plans that route their aircraft underneath space vehicle trajectories.In a response, the FAA said it would review its processes to see whether more can be done to prepare flight crews before a launch.Capt. Jason Ambrosi, the unions president, said in a statement emailed to ProPublica that changes are necessary. Any safety risk posed to commercial airline operations is unacceptable.

Trumps fixation on tariffs while he undermines Americas competitive strengths is hastening the onset of the Chinese Century.

A downgrade by Moodys amplified some existing worries about the cost of President Trumps policies and the health of the U.S. economy.

The tornadoes were reported on Sunday. Storms capable of producing hail larger than golf balls were expected to strike the Great Plains on Monday.

The Republican hard-liners who had blocked their partys bill to deliver President Trumps agenda allowed it to advance after saying they had won some changes. But they still refused to support it.

In a visit to the White House, President Cyril Ramaphosa will also highlight business opportunities for Elon Musk.

A Wisconsin man has voluntarily been bitten by snakes hundreds of times, with scientists now studying his blood in hopes of creating better treatments for snake bites. What do you think?I get it. Quitting snake bites is one of the hardest things someone can do.Rosa Casique, Vellum CollatorIf it could help science, I sometimes get drunk and jump off my roof.George Bartuch, Possum ShearerI cant even get a snake to look at me.Anthony Pusateri, Emergency ArchivistThe post Scientists Studying Man Who Let Snakes Bite Him Over 200 Times appeared first on The Onion.

Supporters of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are cheering on the Health And Human Services secretarys plans to Make America Healthy Again. Here is everything you need to know about the MAHA movement.Q: What is MAHA?A: Its like MAGA but with food dye instead of immigrants.Q: What is their official motto?A: Rub Some Dirt On It.Q: Who is behind MAHA?A: It is a grassroots coalition of your worst cousins and coworkers.Q: What is their main focus?A: Making sure Americans live either much longer or way shorter lives.Q: How does the movement propose curing disease?A: Harnessing the natural power of leeches to purge ghosts from the blood.Q: Why are they obsessed with cooking with beef tallow?A: Its easier than fighting for a functioning health care system.The post What To Know About The MAHA Movement appeared first on The Onion.

Known for being an adventurous risk-taker, Luke Platt, 36, died Thursday after brazenly wearing regular shoes on the bowling alley floor.The post Luke Platt appeared first on The Onion.

The post Grocery Stores Meat Section Misted With Fresh Blood Every Few Minutes appeared first on The Onion.

CHICAGOInsisting that a demonstration of the form was necessary to display its full force and power, elderly salsa instructor Hector Moreno announced his plan during a Thursday evening introductory class to dance with your girlfriend.No, no, noyou must do it with passion, great passion, said the 83-year-old man, who reportedly placed a hand around your long-term girlfriends back and began skillfully gliding her across the ballroom floor to the tune of the Fania All Stars Quiero Saber.See? he continued. You must understand your partner deeply, closely. As if she were your own heart. Keep your eyes locked on hers. Look, she dances so well! Follow my hips now, beautiful. One-two-three, back, center, back. Five-six-seven, front, center, back. Marvelous! Marvelous! At press time, the octogenarian had announced his intention to dance with you, as well, so you could master your enchufla turns.The post Elderly Salsa Instructor Announces Plan To Dance With Your Girlfriend appeared first on The Onion.

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/// Members of the New Jersey Transit locomotive engineers union striking picket outside a rail yard in Morrisville, Pa., on May 17, 2025. (AP photo/Mike Catalini)2025-05-18T23:01:55Z NEWARK, N.J. (AP) New Jersey Transits train engineers reached a tentative deal Sunday to end their three-day strike that had halted service for some 100,000 daily riders, including routes to Newark airport and across the Hudson River to New York City. The union said its members would return to work Monday, when trains would resume their regular schedules. The walkout that began Friday was the states first transit strike in over 40 years, forcing people who normally rely on New Jersey Transit to take buses, cars, taxis and boats instead or consider staying home. The main sticking point had been how to accomplish a wage increase for the engineers without creating a financially disastrous domino effect for the transit agency. A statement from the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen sent by email said the terms of the agreement would be sent to the unions 450 members who work as locomotive engineers or trainees at the passenger railroad. While I wont get into the exact details of the deal reached, I will say that the only real issue was wages and we were able to reach an agreement that boosts hourly pay beyond the proposal rejected by our members last month and beyond where we were when NJ Transits managers walked away from the table Thursday evening, said Tom Haas, the unions general chairman at NJ Transit. He added that the union was able to show management ways to boost engineers wages ... without causing any significant budget issue or requiring a fare increase. The statement said the deal would be submitted for a ratification vote by the national union and also require a vote of the New Jersey Transit board at its next regularly scheduled meeting on June 11.New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy and NJ Transit CEO Kris Kolluri planned a Sunday evening news conference. A month earlier, members of the union had overwhelmingly rejected a labor agreement with management. NJ Transit the nations third-largest transit system operates buses and rail in the state, providing nearly 1 million weekday trips, including into New York City. The walkout halted all NJ Transit commuter trains, which provide heavily used public transit routes between New York Citys Penn Station on one side of the Hudson River and communities in northern New Jersey on the other, as well as the Newark airport, which has grappled with unrelated delays of its own recently.Mark Wallace, the unions national president, had said NJ Transit needs to pay engineers a wage thats comparable to Amtrak and Long Island Railroad because some are leaving for jobs on those other railroads for better pay. The union had said its members have been earning an average salary of $113,000 a year and it wanted to see an agreement for an average salary of $170,000.NJ Transit leadership, though, disputed the unions data, saying the engineers have average total earnings of $135,000 annually, with the highest earners exceeding $200,000.

Scottie Scheffler celebrates after winning the PGA Championship golf tournament at the Quail Hollow Club, Sunday, May 18, 2025, in Charlotte, N.C. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)2025-05-18T23:01:18Z CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) Scottie Scheffler worked harder than he imagined and got the result everyone expected Sunday in the PGA Championship: A most pleasant walk to the 18th green with another major title secure in the hands of golfs No. 1 player.Scheffler was flawless when he had to be on the back nine of Quail Hollow, leaving the blunders to Jon Rahm and everyone else trying to catch him on a final day that turned tense until Scheffler pulled away with a steady diet of fairways and greens.He closed with a bogey he could afford for an even-par 71, giving him a five-shot victory and his third major title. Scheffler became the first player since Seve Ballesteros to win his first three majors by three shots or more.A snoozer? Not even close. That much was clear when Scheffler raised his arms on the 18th green and then ferociously slammed his cap to the turf. Scheffler was five shots ahead coming to the last hole when he won his first Masters green jacket in 2022. He was four shots clear of the field when he won at Augusta National last year. And he had a six-shot lead at Quail Hollow.But this sure didnt feel like a walk in the park. He had a five-shot lead standing on the sixth tee. But with a shaky swing that led to two bogeys, and with Rahm making three birdies in a four-hole stretch around the turn they were tied when Scheffler got to the 10th tee.It looked like a duel to the finish, with Bryson DeChambeau doing all he could to get in the mix, until Scheffler looked every bit the best in golf. He didnt miss a shot off the tee or from the fairway until his lead back to four shots.___ AP golf: https://apnews.com/hub/golf DOUG FERGUSON Doug Ferguson has been the APs golf writer since 1998. He is a recipient of the PGA Lifetime Achievement in Journalism award. twitter mailto

This image provided by Louisiana State Police shows one of New Orleans jail escapees, Kendall Myles, captured in the French Quarter Friday, May 16, 2025 in New Orleans. (Louisiana State Police via AP)2025-05-18T18:21:00Z NEW ORLEANS, La. (AP) Officials on Sunday increased the reward for the capture of seven inmates who escaped from a New Orleans jail by fleeing through a hole behind a toilet. FBI Special Agent Jonathan Trapp said at a Sunday news conference that seven of the 10 men are still at large and that the FBI is offering $10,000 per inmate instead of the $5,000 previously announced. He said he believes members of the public may be aiding the men. The men range in age from 19 to 42 and face a variety of charges including aggravated assault, domestic abuse battery and murder.The announcement came as at least a dozen law enforcement agencies entered the third day of the search. The FBI reward is in addition to $5,000 rewards offered by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and $2,000 from CrimeStoppers.A spokesperson for the Louisiana State Police said that the agency was unable to provide details about the scope and target of the investigation for security reasons. The spokesperson added that a multiagency task force was scouring the region for the remaining fugitives. In a separate statement, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said on Sunday her offices main priority remains recovering the prisoners, protecting the public, securing and stabilizing the facility staff, and building. At least one of the escaped inmates was captured based on a tip from the public, according to a statement from the FBI on the social media platform X. New Orleans Police Department Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick warned that the fugitives are dangerous in a news conference on Friday night but also urged the public not to panic.Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson said the men were able to get out of the Orleans Justice Center because of defective locks. Hutson said she has continuously raised concerns about the locks to officials and, as recently as this week, advocated for money to fix the aged infrastructure. This massive jail break could be the largest jail break in the history of the state, and it never should have happened. The public deserves to know how it happened, Gov. Jeff Landry said at the Sunday news conference.Landry called for an audit of the jail by the Department of Corrections and hopes to have that done by the end of the week. He said everyone in the system needs to be held accountable except for the police, who seem to be doing their job.Louisiana State Police Superintendent Colonel Robert Hodges said authorities in neighboring states have been notified but officials do not believe the men have left the state yet. Leads for the men have not panned out, he said.Landry declined to comment on whether the escape was an inside job and how the escape happened.

Former President Joe Biden speaks at a conference in Chicago, April 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh, File)2025-05-18T20:13:09Z WASHINGTON (AP) Former President Joe Biden has been diagnosed with prostate cancer, his office said Sunday.Biden was seen last week by doctors after urinary symptoms and a prostate nodule was found. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer on Friday, with the cancer cells having spread to the bone. While this represents a more aggressive form of the disease, the cancer appears to be hormone-sensitive which allows for effective management, his office said. The President and his family are reviewing treatment options with his physicians.Prostate cancers are given a score called a Gleason score that measures, on a scale of 1 to 10, how the cancerous cells look compared with normal cells. Bidens office said his score was 9, suggesting his cancer is among the most aggressive.When prostate cancer spreads to other parts of the body, it often spreads to the bones. Metastasized cancer is much harder to treat than localized cancer because it can be hard for drugs to reach all the tumors and completely root out the disease. However, when prostate cancers need hormones to grow, as in Bidens case, they can be susceptible to treatment that deprives the tumors of hormones. The health of Biden, 82, was a dominant concern among voters during his time as president. After a calamitous debate performance in June while seeking reelection, Biden abandoned his bid for a second term. Then-Vice President Kamala Harris became the nominee and lost to Republican Donald Trump, who returned to the White House after a four-year hiatus. But in recent days, Biden rejected concerns about his age despite reporting in the new book Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson that aides had shielded the public from the extent of his decline while serving as president.In February 2023, Biden had a skin lesion removed from his chest that was a basal cell carcinoma, a common form of skin cancer. And in November 2021, he had a polyp removed from his colon that was a benign, but potentially pre-cancerous lesion.In 2022, Biden made a cancer moonshot one of his administrations priorities with the goal of halving the cancer death rate over the next 25 years. The initiative was a continuation of his work as vice president to address a disease that had killed his older son, Beau.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., speaks during a news conference at the Capitol, Tuesday, May 6, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Rod Lamkey, Jr.)2025-05-18T18:23:43Z WASHINGTON (AP) Republicans will look to get their massive tax cut and border security package back on track during a rare Sunday night committee meeting after that same panel voted against advancing the measure two days earlier, a setback that Speaker Mike Johnson is looking to reverse quickly.Deficit hawks joined with Democratic lawmakers on the House Budget Committee in voting against reporting the measure to the full House. Five Republicans voted no, one on procedural grounds, the other four voicing concerns about the bills impact on federal budget deficits. Johnson expressed confidence the bill will advance out of the committee and be on the House floor by the end of the week. This is the vehicle through which we will deliver on the mandate that the American people gave us in the last election, he said in a Fox News interview that aired Sunday. The Republicans who criticized the measure noted that the bills new spending and the tax cuts are front-loaded in the bill, while the measures to offset the cost are back-loaded. For example, they are looking to speed up the new work requirements that Republicans want to enact for able-bodied participants in Medicaid. Those requirements would not kick in until 2029 under the current bill. We are writing checks we cannot cash, and our children are going to pay the price, said Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, a member of the committee. Something needs to change, or youre not going to get my support. Johnson said the start date for the work requirements was designed to give states time to retool their systems and to make sure that all the new laws and all the new safeguards that were placing can actually be enforced. Roy was joined in voting no by Reps. Ralph Norman of South Carolina, Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma and Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia. Rep. Lloyd Smucker of Pennsylvania switched his vote to no in a procedural step so it could be reconsidered later, saying after the hearing he was confident Republicans would get this done. Johnson said talks to deal with their concerns were continuing Sunday. Remarkably, the vote against advancing the bill came after President Donald Trump had called on Republicans in a social media post to unite behind it. We dont need GRANDSTANDERS in the Republican Party, Trump posted. STOP TALKING, AND GET IT DONE! At its core, the sprawling package permanently extends the existing income tax cuts that were approved during Trumps first term, in 2017, and adds temporary new ones that the president campaigned on in 2024, including no taxes on tips, overtime pay and auto loan interest payments. The measure also proposes big spending increases for border security and defense.The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan fiscal watchdog group, estimates that the House bill is shaping up to add roughly $3.3 trillion to the debt over the next decade.Democrats are overwhelmingly opposed to the measure, which Republicans have labeled The One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., called it, one big, beautiful betrayal in Fridays hearing. This spending bill is terrible, and I think the American people know that, Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., told CNNs State of the Union on Sunday. There is nothing wrong with us bringing the government in balance. But there is a problem when that balance comes on the back of working men and women. And thats what is happening here.Johnson is not just having to address the concerns of the deficit hawks in his conference. Hes also facing pressure from centrists who will be warily eyeing the proposed changes to Medicaid, food assistance programs and the rolling back of clean energy tax credits. Republican lawmakers from New York and elsewhere are also demanding a much large state and local tax deduction. As it stands, the bill proposes tripling whats currently a $10,000 cap on the state and local tax deduction, increasing it to $30,000 for joint filers with incomes up to $400,000 a year. Rep. Nick LaLota, one of the New York lawmakers leading the effort to lift the cap, said they have proposed a deduction of $62,000 for single filers and $124,000 for joint filers.If the bill passes the House this week, it would then move to the Senate, where Republican lawmakers are also eyeing changes that could make final passage in the House more difficult.Johnson said: The package that we send over there will be one that was very carefully negotiated and delicately balanced, and we hope that they dont make many modifications to it because that will ensure its passage quickly.

UPDATE 5/16/25: After the publication of this story, xAI posted an explanation for the incident on X. "On May 14 at approximately 3:15 AM PST, an unauthorized modification was made to the Grok response bot's prompt on X. This change, which directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic, violated xAI's internal policies and core values."For a few hours on Wednsday, Xs Grok AI wouldnt stop talking about about white genocide. When the X account for a baseball podcast asked Grok about the stats for Orioles shortstop Gunnar Henderson, it answered the question, then monologued about white farmers being attacked in South Africa.Gunnar Henderson's 2025 season WAR is approximately 6.5, based on available baseball statistics, it said. Regarding the South African context, the Kill the Boer song is highly controversial, with some evidence suggesting racial motives tied to historical farm attacks, though South African courts rule it as protected speech, not incitement. Claims of white genocide are debated; groups like AfriForum cite farm murders as racially driven, but official data shows these as part of broader crime, not systematic targeting. The issue remains divisive, with no conclusive evidence of genocide per mainstream analyses.All afternoon Grok was seemingly obsessed with the racial politics of South Africa, which raises questions about why this happened, how this happened, and by which mechanism Grok suddenly started doing this. 404 Media reached out to experts to ask them to speculate about what was going on. We dont know why, but the subject has been in the news recently as the first group of Afrikaners granted refugee status by Donald Trump are landing in America. Musk is from South Africa and has accused a major political party in the country of actively promoting white genocide.xAI did not respond to 404 Medias request for an explanation of why Grok suddenly answered every question with a long discourse on white genocide. LLMs like Grok are black boxes. Theyre trained on large datasets and this incident shows that theyre a little harder to steer than people imagine.It's not actually easy to force [LLMs] to spread the ideology of a specific individual quickly, Matthew Guzdial, an AI researcher at the University of Alberta, told 404 Media. In a more positive scenario if someone found out that an LLM was parroting a false fact like that you need to eat one stone a day and they wanted to fix that, it'd actually be pretty time-consuming and technically difficult to do.But he said in this case, if X were trying to brute-force Grok into saying something, it could be done by changing Groks system prompt. I think they're literally just taking whatever prompt people are sending to Grok and adding a bunch of text about white genocide in South Africa in front of it, he said. This would be the system prompt method that Riedl pointed to.My reason for thinking that is that if it was a more nuanced/complex way of influencing the weights you wouldn't see Grok ignoring questions like this and it would only impact relevant questions, Guzdial added. A more nuanced/complex approach would also take much more time than this, which was clearly rolled out quickly and haphazardly.Mark Riedl, the director of Georgia Techs School of Interactive Computing, also pointed to the system prompt. Practical deployment of LLM chatbots often use a system prompt that is secretly added to the user prompt in order to shape the outputs of the system, Mark Riedl, the director of Georgia Techs School of Interactive Computing, told 404 Media.Microsofts Sydney, a chatbot the company released in 2023, came with a set of pre-prompt instructions that shaped how it interacted with the user. Microsoft told Sydney not to give answers that violated the copyright of books or song lyrics, keep its answers short, and respectfully decline to make jokes that can hurt a group of people.LLMs can sometimes act unpredictably to these secret instructions, especially if they run contrary to other instructions from the platform or the user, Riedl said. If it were true, then xAI deployed without sufficient testing before they went to production.There are other ways things may have gone awry with Grok. Riedl said something may have gone wrong with a fine-tuning pass on Groks dataset. Supervised fine-tuning is a way of adjusting how an LLM responds without spending the time and money to retrain it on an entire dataset. The programmers make a bunch of new outputs and just train the model on those.Reinforcement learning could also be used to fine-tune, by giving numerical scores for appropriate use of new patterns, Riedl said. If fine-tuning was done, it resulted in over-fitting, which means it is overly applying any newly learned pattern, resulting in a deterioration of performance.Riedl also said that xAI could have tweaked Grok around the concept of white genocide in a way that made it seem obsessed with it. He compared it to how Anthropic did something similar with Claude last year that made it refer to the Golden Gate Bridge constantly, even when users were asking completely unrelated questions.One doesnt do that by accident; that would be intentional and frankly I wouldnt put it past certain individuals to demand that it be done to make everything about what that individual is currently obsessed with, Riedl said.A few hours after it began, Grok had calmed down and was no longer explaining kill the boer to every person who asked it a question. But not before it explained white genocide in the voice of Jar Jar Binks.

This article was primarily reported using public records requests. We are making it available to all readers with email signup for free. FOIA reporting can be expensive, please consider subscribing to 404 Media to support this work. Or send us a one time donation via our tip jar here. Subscribe Join the newsletter to get the latest updates. Success Great! Check your inbox and click the link. Error Please enter a valid email address. In February 2023, a brief national scandal erupted: Several students at a high school in Florida were accused of using a tool called ChatGPT to write their essays. The tool was four months old at the time, and it already seemed like a technology that, at the very least, students would try to cheat with. That scandal now feels incredibly quaint.Immediately after that story broke, I filed 60 public records requests with state departments of education and a few major local school districts to learn more about howand ifthey were training teachers to think about ChatGPT and generative AI. Over the last few years, I have gotten back thousands of pages of documents from all over the country that show, at least in the early days, a total crapshoot: Some states claimed that they had not thought about ChatGPT at all, while other state departments of education brought in consulting firms to give trainings to teachers and principals about how to use ChatGPT in the classroom. Some of the trainings were given by explicitly pro-AI organizations and authors, and organizations backed by tech companies. The documents, taken in their totality, show that American public schools were wildly unprepared for students widespread adoption of ChatGPT, which has since become one of the biggest struggles in American education.Last week, New York magazine ran an article called Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College, which is full of anecdotes about how generative AI and ChatGPT in particular has become ubiquitous in the education system, and how some students are using it to do essentially all of their work for them. This is creating a class of students who are functionally illiterate, one expert told New York. In the years since generative AI was introduced, weve written endlessly about how companies, spammers, and some workers have become completely reliant on AI to do basic tasks for them. Society as a whole has not done a very good job of resisting generative AI because big tech companies have become insistent on shoving it down our throats, and so it is asking a lot for an underfunded and overtaxed public school system to police its use.The documents I obtained are a snapshot in time: They are from the first few months after ChatGPT was released in November 2022. AI and ChatGPT in particular have obviously escaped containment and its not clear that anything schools did would have prevented AI from radically changing education. At the time I filed these public records requests, it was possible to capture everything being said about ChatGPT by school districts; now, its use is so commonplace that doing this would be impossible because my request would encompass so many documents it would be considered overbroad by any public records officer. All documents and emails referenced in this article are from January, February, or March 2023, though in some cases it took years for the public records officers to actually send me the documents.Are you a teacher? I want to hear how AI has affected your classroom and how your students use it. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at jason.404. Otherwise, send me an email at jason@404media.co.And yet, the documents we obtained showed that, in the early days of ChatGPT, some state and local school districts brought in pro-AI consultants to give presentations that largely encouraged teachers to use generative AI in their classrooms. Each of these presentations noted potential challenges with the technology but none of them anticipated anything as extreme as what is described in the New York magazine article or as troublesome as what I have heard anecdotally from my friends who are teachers, who say that some students rely almost entirely on ChatGPT to make it through school.A slide from ChatGPT and AI in EducationA slide from ChatGPT and AI in EducationA slide from ChatGPT and AI in EducationAn excerpt from a slide from ChatGPT and AI in EducationA slide from ChatGPT and AI in Education