Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket are booming, and so is a fight among regulators, lawmakers, and advocates over their legality. Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who currently serves as an advisor to the American Gaming Association, has criticized prediction markets. The political fight in the US over the future of prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi has escalated into a full-blown war, and battle lines aren't being neatly drawn along party lines. Instead, conservative Mormons have aligned themselves with Las Vegas bigwigs and MAGA royalty is siding with liberal Democrat lobbyists. One side argues that the platforms are breaking the law by operating as shadow casinos.

Former Harvard president Larry Summers has said he will step back from public commitments after his emails with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein were made public. I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognise the pain they have caused, he said in a statement to CBS News, the BBC's US partner. I take full responsibility for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr Epstein. Emails released by Congress last week show Summers, a former US treasury secretary, communicated with Epstein until the day before the paedophile's 2019 arrest for sex trafficking minors. On Tuesday, House members are expected to vote on releasing all files related to the late sex offender.

After Zohran Mamdani's victory, Republicans are fearmongering about Democrats turning socialist. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is busy taking stakes in private companies and ordering them around. With the victory of Zohran Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, in New York City's mayoral election last week, socialism is on the march. "This is the future House Democrats want, and your city could be next," an N.R.C.C. ad blared the day after Mamdani won. Mamdani is hardly representative of the national Democratic Party.

Social media has reshaped political discourse, offering politicians a platform for direct engagement while reinforcing polarization and ideological divides. This study introduces a novel topic evolution framework that integrates BERTopic-based topic modeling with Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) to analyze the longevity and moral dimensions of political topics in Twitter activity during the 117th U.S. Congress. We propose a methodology for tracking dynamic topic shifts over time and measuring their association with moral values and quantifying topic persistence. Our findings reveal that while overarching themes remain stable, granular topics tend to dissolve rapidly, limiting their long-term influence. Moreover, moral foundations play a critical role in topic longevity, with Care and Loyalty dominating durable topics, while partisan differences manifest in distinct moral framing strategies. This work contributes to the field of social network analysis and computational political discourse by offering a scalable, interpretable approach to understanding moral-driven topic evolution on social media.

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. Challenges to Pelosi part of broader movement to replace the Democratic Party's old guard Rep. Nancy Pelosi, shown talking to reporters in the U.S. Capitol on Oct. 1, has not said whether she will seek another term in 2026. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . Younger Democratic candidates are challenging older incumbents amid increasing frustration over the party's ineffective resistance to President Trump.

Local news stations are often considered to be reliable sources of non-politicized information, particularly local concerns that residents care about. Because these stations are trusted news sources, viewers are particularly susceptible to the information they report. The Sinclair Broadcast group is a broadcasting company that has acquired many local news stations in the last decade. We investigate the effects of local news stations being acquired by Sinclair: how does coverage change? We use computational methods to investigate changes in internet content put out by local news stations before and after being acquired by Sinclair and in comparison to national news outlets. We find that there is clear evidence that local news stations report more frequently on national news at the expense of local topics, and that their coverage of polarizing national topics increases.

We study transformer language models, analyzing attention heads whose attention patterns are spread out, and whose attention scores depend weakly on content. We argue that the softmax denominators of these heads are stable when the underlying token distribution is fixed. By sampling softmax denominators from a "calibration text", we can combine together the outputs of multiple such stable heads in the first layer of GPT2-Small, approximating their combined output by a linear summary of the surrounding text. This approximation enables a procedure where from the weights alone - and a single calibration text - we can uncover hundreds of first layer neurons that respond to high-level contextual properties of the surrounding text, including neurons that didn't activate on the calibration text.

Mainstream news organizations shape public perception not only directly through the articles they publish but also through the choices they make about which topics to cover (or ignore) and how to frame the issues they do decide to cover. However, measuring these subtle forms of media bias at scale remains a challenge. Here, we introduce a large, ongoing (from January 1, 2024 to present), near real-time dataset and computational framework developed to enable systematic study of selection and framing bias in news coverage. Our pipeline integrates large language models (LLMs) with scalable, near-real-time news scraping to extract structured annotations -- including political lean, tone, topics, article type, and major events -- across hundreds of articles per day. We quantify these dimensions of coverage at multiple levels -- the sentence level, the article level, and the publisher level -- expanding the ways in which researchers can analyze media bias in the modern news landscape. In addition to a curated dataset, we also release an interactive web platform for convenient exploration of these data. Together, these contributions establish a reusable methodology for studying media bias at scale, providing empirical resources for future research. Leveraging the breadth of the corpus over time and across publishers, we also present some examples (focused on the 150,000+ articles examined in 2024) that illustrate how this novel data set can reveal insightful patterns in news coverage and bias, supporting academic research and real-world efforts to improve media accountability.

Larry Ellison Is a'Shadow President' in Donald Trump's America The Ellison family is cornering the market on attention and data the same way the Vanderbilts did railroads and the Rockefellers did oil. Save this storyIn Trumpworld, Larry Ellison gets more credit than anyone else for operating in the shadows. Over a drink earlier in Donald Trump's second term, one of the president's advisers described the Oracle cofounder, chairman, and chief technology officer to me as a literal "shadow president of the United States," if not necessarily the shadow president. In the months since, Ellison, who's been trading the title of "richest man alive" with Elon Musk lately, has begun to live up to the moniker. Musk is almost starting over from scratch, working his way back into Trump's good graces by seeming to pretend that whole ugly breakup and half-baked ploy to form a third party never happened. Rupert Murdoch is 94 years old and ceding more control of his media empire to his son Lachlan.

The Twitch streamer could pivot from influencer to candidate. But he tells WIRED's podcast he'd rather use his platform to tell Dems "you can't podcast your way out of this problem." Hasan Piker is many things to many people. They don't all feel the same way about Piker or his politics, but most presumably agree on one thing: He is a relentless human being. Most days a week, you can find the 34-year-old Twitch streamer talking to his audience, often for six to nine hours at a stretch. And during President Trump's second term, there's plenty of that to go around. He has nearly 3 million followers on Twitch and has hosted conversations with Senator Bernie Sanders and US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He claims his election night stream in 2024 reached a staggering 7.5 million viewers. On this episode of, I talked to Piker about his looks, his love of Italian sandwiches, and any future political aspirations he might (or might not) want to tease. It's great to be here. I heard you were just at the gym. Yeah, I was at the park. Some days I take my dog and I play a little bit of basketball and get to hang out with some people.