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Via LLRX – Hold Fast, Harvard – Since 2025 the Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has engaged in battles with major American institutions of higher education and research. Using the Trump administration’s Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, McMahon demands strict adherence to “educational principles” that include elimination of ‘DEI’ programs to quality for ‘preferential federal …
Biometricupdate.com: “House Democrats introduced legislation that if passed would force federal immigration enforcement agents to wear a public-facing identification in the form of a clearly visible and scannable QR code during enforcement actions. The measure, H.R. 7233, was introduced last week by Rep. Ritchie Torre, a Democrat from New York, and referred to the House …
Axios – Behind the Curtain: “Anthropic’s warning to the world Why it matters: In a new essay, Dario Amodei cautions of the imminent “real danger” that super-human intelligence will cause civilization-level damage absent smart, speedy intervention…” Quartz: “In a sprawling, 38-page essay, “The Adolescence of Technology: Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI,” posted …
[January 20, 2026] “Rep. Robert Garcia, Ranking Member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, released a new report identifying how President Donald Trump has accepted digital kickbacks from foreign and criminal interests as President of the United States. The investigation by Oversight Democrats has found that President Trump and his family are exploiting …
Lifehacker: “Tech companies are getting increasingly pushy with their large language models—prominent buttons for these AI features coat every surface designers can think of, including in three of the most prominent browsers: Chrome, Edge, and Firefox. If you want these AI features to go away, and stay away, there’s a script for that. JustTheBrowser is …
Gizmodo: “The FBI raided the home of The Washington Post reporter and “federal government whisperer” Hannah Natanson last week. The agency seized her private laptop, work laptop, work phone, a 1 TB portable hard drive, a Garmin running watch, and a voice recorder she uses for work, according to newly released court documents. For the …
Via LLRX – 12 ways the Trump administration dismantled civil rights law and the foundations of inclusive democracy in its first year – Spencer Overton, Professor of Law, George Washington University, homes in on how after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, a pattern emerges. Across dozens of executive orders, agency memos, funding decisions and enforcement changes, the …
NewsGuard “tested leading AI chatbots and found that in 78-95 percent of cases, the tools could not tell when videos were created by OpenAI’s text-to-video tool Sora — including OpenAI’s own ChatGPT. OpenAI’s new AI video-generating tool, Sora, has quickly gained a reputation for its ability to fool humans into thinking its videos are authentic. …
Former Special Counsel Jack Smith testified in front of Congress for more than three hours, January 22, 2026 [Video]. “If asked whether to prosecute a former president based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether that president was a Democrat or Republican. No one should be above the law in …
Nature – A series of graphics reveals how the Trump administration has sought historic cuts to science and the research workforce. “More than 7,800 research grants terminated or frozen. Some 25,000 scientists and personnel gone from agencies that oversee research. Proposed budget cuts of 35% — amounting to US$32 billion. These are just a few …
Ars Technica: “On Saturday, tech entrepreneur Siqi Chen released an open source plugin for Anthropic’s Claude Code AI assistant that instructs the AI model to stop writing like an AI model. Called “Humanizer,” the simple prompt plugin feeds Claude a list of 24 language and formatting patterns that Wikipedia editors have listed as chatbot giveaways. …
The Atlantic Gift Article – Drug deaths are finally falling—but the cause may be far outside of U.S. policy makers’ control. “For two decades, the United States and Canada have struggled with a drug epidemic. From 2003 to 2022, annual overdose deaths in the United States rose from less than 26,000 to nearly 108,000—becoming the …
