- Premier Wab Kinew is urging Manitobans to avoid bonfires or fireworks this weekend following the deaths of two people in one of the many wildfires burning around the province. He has to say it, of course, and people really should listen, but given that this weekend happens to be the Victoria Day long weekend, I don't have high hopes.
- Two top US intelligence officials were fired by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard after contradicting Donald Trump's assertion that the Tren de Aragua gang is controlled by the Venezuelan government and thus theoretically undermining Trump's use of the Alien Enemies Act to circumvent due process in deporting people alleged to have connections to the gang.
- An amendment to the Budget Reconciliation Bill in the US House of Representatives would prohibit all regulation of artificial intelligence, at the state as well as the federal level, for a ten year period. The amendment also calls for an investment of $500 million to install "commercial" AI tech and other automation in government systems. Presumably the "commercial" part is to exclude open source, which might allow for too much scrutiny.
- Hasan Piker is an American of Turkish descent who uses Twitch, a livestreaming platform more commonly associated with video games, to do political commentary. While he was born in the US, he currently lives abroad, and when he flew in to speak at University of Chicago Institute of Politics, he was pulled aside and questioned for nearly two hours, apparently about his political views, by US Customs and Border Protection.
- A high school in Kitchener, Ontario has closed until the vaccination status of its students can be determined following a case of measles at the school.
- Doctors and medical researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania have apparently succeeded in using fairly precise gene editing to treat a genetic disease. This is an excellent use of biotechnology; there are others as well. It's just unfortunate that this breakthrough is being made in the present-day US, since it's not hard to imagine what a bunch of Trump-loving Silicon Valley techbros would like to do with these technologies.
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