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"We have no choice but to address the challenges created by these massive facilities," New York governor Kathy Hochul said. The executive order will pause construction for one year. New York governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order Tuesday enacting a one-year pause on the development of hyperscale data centers, effecting the nation's first statewide data center moratorium. The executive order comes as opposition to data center construction sweeps across the country, putting elected officials under intense pressure to take action. The order specifically pauses state environmental reviews for facilities over 50 megawatts for a year.

A Conspiracy Theory About QR Codes Has Led to Chaos Ahead of Georgia's Midterms The state of Georgia banned the use of QR codes for elections, based in part on the assertions of a man who's boosted false claims about Israel and 9/11. Now no one knows how ballots will be counted. QR codes are at the center of the latest conspiracy theory in Georgia's elections. And it's largely thanks to Garland Favorito, a man who has spent decades trying to get people to listen to his conspiracy theories about insecure voting machines being used to rig elections in Georgia. When Georgia became the epicenter of election denial conspiracy theories in 2020, Favorito became an overnight superstar in the election denial community, and an integral part of the vast network of groups across the country that sprang up to promote the baseless claim that US elections are rigged.

As industrial operations move to the state, residents find that their drinking water has been promised to companies. In 2019, Corpus Christi, Texas's eighth-largest city, moved forward with plans to build a desalination plant. The facility, which was expected to be completed by 2023, at a cost of a hundred and forty million dollars, would convert seawater into fresh water to be used by the area's many refineries and chemical plants. The former mayor called it "a pretty significant day in the life of our city." In anticipation of the plant's opening, the city committed to provide tens of millions of gallons of water per day to new industrial operations, including a plastics plant co-owned by ExxonMobil and the Saudi Basic Industries Corporation, a lithium refinery for Tesla batteries, and a "specialty chemicals" plant operated by Chemours.

Utah District Judge Dianna Gibson will rule Monday on three congressional maps for 2026 elections that could give Democrats a chance to flip Republican House seats.

The risks posed when kids form bonds with chatbots have turned AI safety from an abstract worry into a political flashpoint. As long as there has been AI, there have been people sounding alarms about what it might do to us: rogue superintelligence, mass unemployment, or environmental ruin from data center sprawl. But this week showed that another threat entirely--that of kids forming unhealthy bonds with AI--is the one pulling AI safety out of the academic fringe and into regulators' crosshairs. This has been bubbling for a while. Two high-profile lawsuits filed in the last year, against Character.AI and OpenAI, allege that companion-like behavior in their models contributed to the suicides of two teenagers. A study by US nonprofit Common Sense Media, published in July, found that 72% of teenagers have used AI for companionship.

Process Mining (PM), initially developed for industrial and business contexts, has recently been applied to social systems, including legal ones. However, PM's efficacy in the legal domain is limited by the accessibility and quality of datasets. We introduce ProLiFIC (Procedural Lawmaking Flow in Italian Chambers), a comprehensive event log of the Italian lawmaking process from 1987 to 2022. Created from unstructured data from the Normattiva portal and structured using large language models (LLMs), ProLiFIC aligns with recent efforts in integrating PM with LLMs. We exemplify preliminary analyses and propose ProLiFIC as a benchmark for legal PM, fostering new developments.

EXCLUSIVE: North Carolina's state auditor said he is looking forward to making a positive impact on taxpayers by implementing a state version of Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). In an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital, North Carolina state auditor Dave Boliek said his office would look into how the state government can be more efficient and utilize the resources it has in the "best possible way" for taxpayers. He plans on doing that through House Bill 125, a state-level DOGE initiative named after him that recently passed the legislature. "It helps to give our office and the state auditor's office more resources to take a look at efficiencies and ways to really drill down on determining a good return on investment of taxpayer dollars across North Carolina," Boliek said. "I really support the effort," he said, in part.

Unsupervised machine learning techniques, such as topic modeling and clustering, are often used to identify latent patterns in unstructured text data in fields such as political science and sociology. These methods overcome common concerns about reproducibility and costliness involved in the labor-intensive process of human qualitative analysis. However, two major limitations of topic models are their interpretability and their practicality for answering targeted, domain-specific social science research questions. In this work, we investigate opportunities for using LLM-generated text augmentation to improve the usefulness of topic modeling output. We use a political science case study to evaluate our results in a domain-specific application, and find that topic modeling using GPT-4 augmentations creates highly interpretable categories that can be used to investigate domain-specific research questions with minimal human guidance.

Co-hosts on'The Big Weekend Show' discuss Gov. Gavin Newsom's latest attempts to continue to expand benefits for illegal migrants in the state of California. California Gov. Gavin Newsom tossed out a slew of bills over the weekend, bucking several of his Democratic Party's more progressive initiatives on things like standards for transgender care, regulating gas stoves and providing additional benefits for noncitizens. Newsom, who has had to review more than 1,000 bills over the last few months ahead of Monday's legislative deadline, vetoed AB 2442, AB 2513 and SB 227. AB 2442, which would have expedited medical licenses for out-of-state applicants seeking to perform transgender surgical procedures, was declined by Newsom on Friday. NEWSOM'S DEEPFAKE ELECTION LAWS ARE ALREADY BEING CHALLENGED IN FEDERAL COURT Gov. Gavin Newsom addressed the press over a new state budget.