Jim Acosta and James Carville speculated whether President Trump will try to rig the 2026 midterms in his favor on "The Jim Acosta Show." Former CNN anchor Jim Acosta was slammed on social media after he posted a clip of his "interview" with an artificially animated avatar of deceased teenager Joaquin Oliver to promote a gun control message on Monday. Working with the gun control group Change the Ref, founded by Oliver's parents, Acosta had a conversation on his Substack with an avatar created by the father of the son, who was killed in the Parkland high school shooting in 2018. Oliver would have turned 25 on Monday. Social media users were shocked by Acosta's "grotesque" interview and slammed the journalist for using the deceased teen's avatar for political content.

The Final Exam, a recently released video game in which you play as a student caught amid a school shooting, lasts for around ten minutes, about the length of a real shooting event in a U.S. school. The game opens in an empty locker room. You hear distant gunfire, screams, harried footsteps, and the thudding of heavy furniture being overturned. The sense of disharmony is immediate: a familiar scene of youth and learning is grimly debased into one of peril. As the lockers surround you, their doors gaping, you feel caged: get me out of here. Moments later, as you enter the gymnasium, a two-minute countdown flashes on screen.

The parents of a teenager who was killed in Florida's Parkland school shooting in 2018 have started a bold new project called The Shotline to lobby for stricter gun laws in the country. The Shotline uses AI to recreate the voices of children killed by gun violence and send recordings through automated calls to lawmakers, The Wall Street Journal reported. The project launched on Wednesday, six years after a gunman killed 17 people and injured more than a dozen at a high school in Parkland, Florida. It features the voice of six children, some as young as ten, and young adults, who have lost their lives in incidents of gun violence across the US. Once you type in your zip code, The Shotline finds your local representative and lets you place an automated call from one of the six dead people in their own voice, urging for stronger gun control laws.

Families of gun violence victims are using artificial intelligence to recreate their loved ones' voices and taunt lawmakers who oppose gun control on the sixth anniversary of the Parkland massacre. The robocall messages are being sent to senators and House members who support the National Rifle Association and Second Amendment rights in a campaign that launched on Valentine's Day, Wednesday, according to the Associated Press. Manuel and Patricia Oliver, whose son Joaquin "Guac" Oliver died in the 2018 high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, said the campaign run through The Shotline website is intended to spur Congress to ban the sale of guns like the AR-15 rifle. "We come from a place where gun violence is a problem, but you will never see a 19-year-old with an AR-15 getting into a school and shooting people," Manuel Oliver told the Associated Press in an interview. The Olivers, immigrants from Venezuela, became activists after Joaquin and 13 other students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School were murdered by a 19-year-old killer with a rifle.

Six years ago today, Joaquin Oliver was killed in a hallway outside his Florida classroom, one of 17 students and staff murdered in the worst high school shooting in the US. On Wednesday, lawmakers in Washington DC will hear his voice, recreated by artificial intelligence, in phone calls demanding to know why they've done nothing to tackle the plague of gun violence. "It's been six years and you've done nothing. Not a thing to stop all the shootings that have happened since," the message from Oliver, who was 17 when he died in the 2018 Valentine's Day's tragedy at Parkland's Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school, says. "I'm back today because my parents used AI to recreate my voice to call you. Other victims like me will be calling too, again and again, to demand action. How many calls will it take for you to care? How many dead voices will you hear before you finally listen?"

Since the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the biggest challenges for health systems has been to gain an understanding of the community spread of this virus and to determine how likely is it that a person walking through the doors of a facility is at a higher risk of being COVID-19 positive. Without adequate access to testing data, health systems early-on were often forced to rely on individuals to answer questions such as whether they had traveled to certain high-risk regions. Even that unreliable method of assessing risk started becoming meaningless as local community spread took hold. Parkland Health & Hospital System, the safety net health system for Dallas County, Texas, and PCCI, a Dallas-based non-profit with expertise in the practical applications of advanced data science and social determinants of health, had a better idea. Community spread of an infectious disease is made possible through physical proximity and density of active carriers and non-infected individuals.

The coronavirus pandemic is having a peculiarly American side effect: Gun sales are surging. The stocks of publicly traded guns and ammo companies American Outdoor Brands Corp., Vista Corp., and Sturm Ruger & Co. are up. Sales leaped by more than 19% in January and 17% in February, compared with the same months in 2019, according to Small Arms Analytics & Forecasting. Gun buyers in the United States bought an estimated 1.24 million guns in, January up from 1.04 million the year before, and 1.36 million in February, up from 1.26 million the year before, according to Small Arms Analytics, which bases estimates on background check data. Those millions of new guns are in addition to the approximately 400 million guns American already own.

For Adam Jasinski, a technology director for a school district outside of St Louis, Missouri, monitoring student emails used to be a time-consuming job. Jasinski used to do keyword searches of the official school email accounts for the district's 2,600 students, looking for words like "suicide" or "marijuana". Then he would have to read through every message that included one of the words. The process would occasionally catch some concerning behavior, but "it was cumbersome", Jasinski recalled. Last year Jasinski heard about a new option: following the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, the technology company Bark was offering schools free, automated, 24-hour-a-day surveillance of what students were writing in their school emails, shared documents and chat messages, and sending alerts to school officials any time the monitoring technology flagged concerning phrases.

Paul Hildreth looked at images from security cameras set up at schools in Fulton County, Georgia. He began watching a video of a woman walking inside one of the school buildings. The top of her clothing was bright yellow. Hildreth used his computer's artificial intelligence, or AI system to find other images of the woman. The system put the pictures together in a video that showed where she currently was, where she had been and what she was doing.

To have real value in healthcare, machine learning must be actionable. Too often, IT decision makers don't take a step back and ask if ML makes for a good business model, said Vikas Chowdhry, chief analytics and information officer at Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation. Sometimes, big ideas are better left off the table. "Oftentimes, people forget this," said Chowdhry, speaking this past week during the HIMSS Machine Learning and AI for Healthcare conference in Boston. "We think every problem can be solved with machine learning.