Local governments around the world are making consequential decisions on behalf of their constituents, and these constituents are responding with requests, advice, and assessments of their officials at public meetings. So many small meetings cannot be covered by traditional newsrooms at scale. We propose PUBLICSPEAK, a probabilistic framework which can utilize meeting structure, domain knowledge, and linguistic information to discover public remarks in local government meetings. We then use our approach to inspect the issues raised by constituents in 7 cities across the United States. We evaluate our approach on a novel dataset of local government meetings and find that PUBLICSPEAK improves over state-of-the-art by 10% on average, and by up to 40%.

Fox News' Charlie Hurt and Rachel Campos-Duffy discuss inauguration fashion for this week's installment of their pop culture round-up on'Fox & Friends Weekend'. First lady Melania Trump will speak on Capitol Hill Monday for the first time since returning to the White House, participating in a roundtable with lawmakers from both chambers of Congress focused on punishing online abuse and revenge pornography. The roundtable discussion will focus on online protection and the "Take it Down Act," a bill introduced in the Senate by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., that would make it a federal crime to publish, or threaten to publish, nonconsensual intimate imagery, including "digital forgeries" crafted by artificial intelligence. The bill also would require social media companies and similar websites to put procedures in place to remove such content within 48 hours of notice from the victim. First lady Melania Trump will speak on Capitol Hill for the first time since returning to the White House, participating in a roundtable with lawmakers from both chambers of Congress focused on punishing online abuse and revenge pornography.