Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. On May 6, the Texas House Committee on Public Education discussed S.B. 13, a bill seeking to remove from public school libraries and classrooms all "profane" and "indecent content." At the hearing, Republican Rep. Terri Leo-Wilson focused on the concern that the legislation could harm the transmission of cultural heritage by depriving students of "classics." She explained, using an adjective that in our current culture wars has come to describe a type of humanities education favored by conservatives, that her "kids were classically trained, so they had their graduation picture with all sorts of books … classic works of literature." When an activist commenting during the hearing remarked that among renowned writers, Toni Morrison's work is singularly "very sexualized," Leo-Wilson replied, without reference to any one book, "She might be famous, but that's not considered, I don't think, a classic."

National security and military analyst Dr. Rebecca Grant joins'Fox & Friends First' to discuss President Donald Trump's historic business-focused trip to the Middle East and why a Trump-Putin meeting could be essential for peace in Ukraine. President Donald Trump secured 2 trillion worth of deals with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE during his trip to the Middle East last week in what some have argued is a move to counter China's influence in the region. While China has increasingly bolstered its commercial ties with top Middle Eastern nations who have remained steadfast in their refusal to pick sides amid growing geopolitical tension between Washington and Beijing, Trump may have taken steps to give the U.S. an edge over its chief competitor. But concern has mounted after Trump reversed a Biden-era policy – which banned the sale of AI-capable chips to the UAE and Saudi Arabia – that highly coveted U.S. technologies could potentially fall into the hands of Chinese companies, and in extension, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). U.S. President Donald Trump walks with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman during a welcoming ceremony in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 13, 2025.

Recent action recognition models have achieved impressive results by integrating objects, their locations and interactions. However, obtaining dense structured annotations for each frame is tedious and time-consuming, making these methods expensive to train and less scalable. On the other hand, one does often have access to a small set of annotated images, either within or outside the domain of interest. Here we ask how such images can be leveraged for downstream video understanding tasks. We propose a learning framework StructureViT (SViT for short), which demonstrates how utilizing the structure of a small number of images only available during training can improve a video model.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Had you scanned any of the latest headlines around the TAKE IT DOWN Act, legislation that President Donald Trump signed into law Monday, you would have come away with a deeply mistaken impression of the bill and its true purpose. The surface-level pitch is that this is a necessary law for addressing nonconsensual intimate images--known more widely as revenge porn. Obfuscating its intent with a classic congressional acronym (Tools to Address Known Exploitation by Immobilizing Technological Deepfakes on Websites and Networks), the TAKE IT DOWN Act purports to help scrub the internet of exploitative, nonconsensual sexual media, whether real or digitally mocked up, at a time when artificial intelligence tools and automated image generators have supercharged its spread. Enforcement is delegated to the Federal Trade Commission, which will give online communities that specialize primarily in user-generated content (e.g., social media, message boards) a heads-up and a 48-hour takedown deadline whenever an appropriate example is reported.

A United Arab Emirates (UAE) academic lab today launched an artificial intelligence world model and agent, two large language models (LLMs) and a new research center in Silicon Valley as it ramps up its investment in the cutting-edge field. The UAE's Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) revealed an AI world model called PAN, which can be used to build physically realistic simulations for testing and honing the performance of AI agents. Eric Xing, President and Professor of MBZUAI and a leading AI researcher, revealed the models and lab at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California today. The UAE has made big investments in AI in recent years under the guidance of Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan, the nation's tech-savvy national security advisor and younger brother of president Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. Xing says the UAE's new center in Sunnyvale, California, will help the nation tap into the world's most concentrated source of AI knowledge and talent.

Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) used artificial intelligence from Meta's Llama model to comb through and analyze emails from federal workers. Materials viewed by WIRED show that DOGE affiliates within the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) tested and used Meta's Llama 2 model to review and classify responses from federal workers to the infamous "Fork in the Road" email that was sent across the government in late January. The email offered deferred resignation to anyone opposed to changes the Trump administration was making to its federal workforce, including an enforced return to office policy, downsizing, and a requirement to be "loyal." To leave their position, recipients merely needed to reply with the word "resign." This email closely mirrored one that Musk sent to Twitter employees shortly after he took over the company in 2022.

Sorry to tell you this, but Google's new AI shopping tool appears eager to give J. D. Vance breasts. This week, at its annual software conference, Google released an AI tool called Try It On, which acts as a virtual dressing room: Upload images of yourself while shopping for clothes online, and Google will show you what you might look like in a selected garment. Curious to play around with the tool, we began uploading images of famous men--Vance, Sam Altman, Abraham Lincoln, Michelangelo's David, Pope Leo XIV--and dressed them in linen shirts and three-piece suits. But when we tested a number of articles designed for women on these famous men, the tool quickly adapted: Whether it was a mesh shirt, a low-cut top, or even just a T-shirt, Google's AI rapidly spun up images of the vice president, the CEO of OpenAI, and the vicar of Christ with breasts. It's not just men: When we uploaded images of women, the tool repeatedly enhanced their décolletage or added breasts that were not visible in the original images.

Russia's Defence Ministry said air defences shot down 105 Ukrainian drones over Russian regions, including 35 over the Moscow region, after the ministry said a day earlier that it had downed more than 300 Ukrainian drones. Kherson Governor Oleksandr Prokudin said one person was killed in a Russian artillery attack on the region. H said over the past day, 35 areas in Kherson, including Kherson city, came under artillery shelling and air attacks, wounding 11 people. Ukrainian President Zelenskyy said the "most intense situation" is in the Donetsk region, and the army is continuing "active operations in the Kursk and Belgorod regions". Russia's Defence Ministry said air defences shot down 105 Ukrainian drones over Russian regions, including 35 over the Moscow region, after the ministry said a day earlier that it had downed more than 300 Ukrainian drones.

In this paper, we propose to use the concept of local fairness for auditing and ranking redistricting plans. Given a redistricting plan, a deviating group is a population-balanced contiguous region in which a majority of individuals are of the same interest and in the minority of their respective districts; such a set of individuals have a justified complaint with how the redistricting plan was drawn. A redistricting plan with no deviating groups is called locally fair. We show that the problem of auditing a given plan for local fairness is NP-complete. We present an MCMC approach for auditing as well as ranking redistricting plans. We also present a dynamic programming based algorithm for the auditing problem that we use to demonstrate the efficacy of our MCMC approach. Using these tools, we test local fairness on real-world election data, showing that it is indeed possible to find plans that are almost or exactly locally fair. Further, we show that such plans can be generated while sacrificing very little in terms of compactness and existing fairness measures such as competitiveness of the districts or seat shares of the plans.

A routine training flight over Arizona in January 2023 took an unusual turn when a U.S. Air Force F-16D was struck by what was initially reported as an unidentified object, but now U.S. defense officials say was a small drone. Fox News confirmed that the incident, which occurred near Gila Bend, Arizona, on Jan. 19, 2023, was a routine training mission and was witnessed by the instructor pilot seated in the rear of the two-seat aircraft. According to a U.S. defense official, the pilot observed a "mostly white and orange object" collide with the left side of the aircraft canopy, the transparent covering over the cockpit. Initially, the object was thought to be a bird, a common hazard for aircraft. But after conducting checks during the flight and a detailed inspection upon landing at Tucson International Airport, the crew found "zero evidence" of a bird strike.