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The CDC Has a Leadership Crisis

WIRED

A 2023 law championed by Republicans requires the CDC have a director confirmed by the Senate. For months, though, it's had only acting directors--and the White House won't say when that will change. As the agency rotates through a cast of leaders, it's unclear when--or if--the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will get a permanent director under Donald Trump's second term as president. Following Jim O'Neill's departure as acting CDC director last week, National Institutes of Health director Jay Bhattacharya will now lead both agencies temporarily. It's the latest in a series of shakeups at Trump's CDC, which has lost about a quarter of its staff to mass layoffs carried out by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. last year.


Challenges to Pelosi part of broader movement to replace the Democratic Party's old guard

Los Angeles Times

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.


Trump is letting Putin win

Al Jazeera

Russian and Ukrainian delegations met in Istanbul for the second time in a month on June 2 to explore the possibility of a ceasefire. The talks lasted just over an hour and, once again, produced no meaningful progress. As with the May 16 negotiations, both sides claimed they had laid the groundwork for prisoner exchanges. But despite Ukraine's offer to hold another meeting before the end of June, a deep and unbridgeable divide remains between Kyiv and Moscow. More meetings are unlikely to change that.


'It's long past time': Colombian-born GOP senator rallies around making English official language of US

FOX News

FIRST ON FOX: Freshman GOP Sen. Bernie Moreno is introducing a bill that would declare English as the official language of the United States. The bill, named the English Language Unity Act of 2025, would "declare English as the official language of the United States" and "establish a uniform English language rule for naturalization, and to avoid misconstructions of the English language texts of the laws of the United States." Variations of the bill have been put forward in the past, including in 2023 from then Ohio Sen. JD Vance, who said at the time that English "has been a cornerstone of American culture for over 250 years" and that it "is far past time for Congress to codify its place into law, which is exactly what this bill does." In a statement to Fox News Digital, Moreno, who was born in Colombia, said, "JD Vance was right – English is the official language of the United States and, as one of the only naturalized citizens serving in the Senate, I should know." Bernie Moreno has introduced a bill to make English the official language of the United States.


Question-to-Question Retrieval for Hallucination-Free Knowledge Access: An Approach for Wikipedia and Wikidata Question Answering

Thottingal, Santhosh

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper introduces an approach to question answering over knowledge bases like Wikipedia and Wikidata by performing "question-to-question" matching and retrieval from a dense vector embedding store. Instead of embedding document content, we generate a comprehensive set of questions for each logical content unit using an instruction-tuned LLM. These questions are vector-embedded and stored, mapping to the corresponding content. Vector embedding of user queries are then matched against this question vector store. The highest similarity score leads to direct retrieval of the associated article content, eliminating the need for answer generation. Our method achieves high cosine similarity ( > 0.9 ) for relevant question pairs, enabling highly precise retrieval. This approach offers several advantages including computational efficiency, rapid response times, and increased scalability. We demonstrate its effectiveness on Wikipedia and Wikidata, including multimedia content through structured fact retrieval from Wikidata, opening up new pathways for multimodal question answering.


CNN's Jake Tapper warns we're entering era of 'deepfakes and all sorts of misinformation'

FOX News

CNN's Jake Tapper warned on Monday that the country was about to enter an "era of deepfakes and all sorts of disinformation" under President Trump, while discussing the Big Tech presence at his inauguration. "We're about to enter an era of deepfakes, and all sorts of misinformation and the degree to which those five gentlemen play a role or do not play a role, will be pivotal in terms of where the American people are four years from now, in terms of understanding what is true and what is false," Tapper said before Trump took the oath of office. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Tesla founder Elon Musk, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai were among the tech giants attending the inauguration. Tapper said those five people "control so much of the information that we receive, so much is in their hands when it comes to ascertaining, monitoring, or refusing to monitor what is real, what is not real." CNN's Jake Tapper speaks on CNN on Jan. 12, 2025.


Learning Curve: The new players in Congress

FOX News

Fox News senior congressional correspondent Chad Pergram joins'Fox News Live' to explain how he prepares to report on Congress for the upcoming year. Every two years, the period between the November election and when the new Congress begins is often the busiest swath of time for covering Congress. Reporters are trying to figure out who won their elections and who lost. The existing Congress is back, attempting to prevent a government shutdown and often plowing through a landscape of other major legislation. There are often leadership elections.


OpenAI shift to for-profit company may lead it to cut corners, says whistleblower

The Guardian

OpenAI's plan to become a for-profit company could encourage the artificial intelligence startup to cut corners on safety, a whistleblower has said. William Saunders, a former research engineer at OpenAI, told the Guardian he was concerned by reports that the ChatGPT developer was preparing to change its corporate structure and would no longer be controlled by its non-profit board. Saunders, who flagged his concerns in testimony to the US Senate this month, said he was also concerned by reports that OpenAI's chief executive, Sam Altman, could hold a stake in the restructured business. "I'm most concerned about what this means for governance of safety decisions at OpenAI," he said. "If the non-profit board is no longer in control of these decisions and Sam Altman holds a significant equity stake, this creates more incentive to race and cut corners."


Senate to vote on contentious Arctic ambassador nominee with deep ties to China and Russia

FOX News

Fox News' Bill Hemmer discusses his trip to join the U.S. Navy in the Arctic Circle and tour a nuclear submarine. When the Biden administration nominated Michael Sfraga to be special ambassador to the Arctic, he failed to disclose his deep history with Russia and China. The Senate is expected to vote on Sfraga's confirmation on Tuesday – over a year after his nomination, which was held up by Republicans who claim he is too close to U.S. adversaries. Sfraga has traveled extensively across Russia and China, and even spoke at an event where Russian President Vladimir Putin gave the headline address. An Alaskan and geographer by background, Sfraga chairs the Polar Institute and the U.S. Arctic Research Commission.


OpenAI's Sam Altman is becoming one of the most powerful people on Earth. We should be very afraid

The Guardian

On 16 May 2023, Sam Altman, OpenAI's charming, softly spoken, eternally optimistic billionaire CEO, and I stood in front of the US Senate judiciary subcommittee meeting on AI oversight. We were in Washington DC, and it was at the height of AI mania. Altman, then 38, was the poster boy for it all. Raised in St Louis, Missouri, Altman was the Stanford dropout who had become the president of the massively successful Y Combinator startup incubator before he was 30. A few months before the hearing, his company's product ChatGPT had taken the world by storm. All through the summer of 2023, Altman was treated like a Beatle, stopping by DC as part of a world tour, meeting prime ministers and presidents around the globe. US Senator Kyrsten Sinema gushed: "I've never met anyone as smart as Sam… He's an introvert and shy and humble… But… very good at forming relationships with people on the Hill and… can help folks in government understand AI." Glowing portraits at the time painted the youthful Altman as sincere, talented, rich and interested in nothing more than fostering humanity.