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Mitch McConnell Breaks Silence With Statement and Photo Amid Questions About Health Status

TIME - Tech

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US Senator Mitch McConnell says absence due to fall and pneumonia

BBC News

Image caption, McConnell released a photo of himself with his wife alongside Sunday's statement US Senator Mitch McConnell says he will not be returning to the Senate quite yet after suffering from a fall and a mild case of pneumonia. It is the first statement from the 84-year-old Kentucky Republican after weeks of speculation about his health, following his admission to hospital in mid-June. A photo was released by his office, in addition to the statement, which shows McConnell with his wife holding what appeared to be Sunday's Washington Post newspaper. He said he was briefly unconscious after his fall and taken to hospital, where he had submitted to every test they can think of to help figure out what caused this incident. My doctors have confirmed that I didn't break any bones or suffer a concussion.


Anthony Zurcher: From Trump critic to ally, Lindsey Graham was a political survivor of the Maga era

BBC News

Lindsey Graham, who has died aged 71, was a political survivor. His career as a Republican senator served as a telling barometer for the dramatically changing climate in his political party - and America - in the Donald Trump era. While there were certain issues central to Graham's political identity - including a hawkish foreign policy that focused on containing Russian global ambitions, support for Israel and regime change in Iran - his 23-year career in the Senate was marked by a willingness to adapt to the gale-force change of political winds that accompanied Trump's rise to power. Shortly after being elected to represent South Carolina in the Senate in 2002, Graham became a close ally of Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who, while a staunch conservative, developed a national reputation for political independence. When Graham ran for president in 2015, the idea of cooling partisan tensions and working with political opponents was one of his central messages. If I get to be president, we're going to open up a bar in the White House, Graham said.


Why Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego Is Under Federal Investigation Over Suspected Campaign Finance Violations

TIME - Tech

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UNH at CheckThat! 2025: Fine-tuning Vs Prompting in Claim Extraction

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We participate in CheckThat! Task 2 English and explore various methods of prompting and in-context learning, including few-shot prompting and fine-tuning with different LLM families, with the goal of extracting check-worthy claims from social media passages. Our best METEOR score is achieved by fine-tuning a FLAN-T5 model. However, we observe that higher-quality claims can sometimes be extracted using other methods, even when their METEOR scores are lower.


How the Loudest Voices in AI Went From 'Regulate Us' to 'Unleash Us'

WIRED

On May 16, 2023, Sam Altman appeared before a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary. The title of the hearing was "Oversight of AI." The session was a lovefest, with both Altman and the senators celebrating what Altman called AI's "printing press moment"--and acknowledging that the US needed strong laws to avoid its pitfalls. "We think that regulatory intervention by governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models," he said. The legislators hung on Altman's every word as he gushed about how smart laws could allow AI to flourish--but only within firm guidelines that both lawmakers and AI builders deemed vital at that moment.


That weird call or text from a senator is probably an AI scam

Popular Science

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. If you recently received a voice message from an unusual number claiming to be your local congressperson, it's probably a scam. The FBI's crime division issued a warning this week about a new scheme in which bad actors use text messages and AI-generated voice clones to impersonate government officials. The scammers try to build a sense of connection with their target and eventually convince them to click on a malicious link that steals valuable login credentials. This scam is just the latest in a series of evolving attacks using convincing generative AI technology to trick people.


Elon Musk shows he still has the White House's ear on Trump's Middle East trip

The Guardian

Over the course of an eight-minute interview, Elon Musk touted his numerous businesses and vision of a "Star Trek future" while telling the crowd that his Tesla Optimus robots had performed a dance for Donald Trump and the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, to the tune of YMCA. He also announced that Starlink, his satellite internet company, had struck a deal for use in Saudi Arabia for maritime and aviation usage; looking to the near future, he expressed his desire to bring Tesla's self-driving robotaxis to the country. "We could not be more appreciative of having a lifetime partner and a friend like you, Elon, to the Kingdom," Saudi Arabia's minister of communications and IT, Abdullah Alswaha, told Musk. Although Musk has pivoted away from his role as de facto leader of the so-called "department of government efficiency" and moved out of the White House, the Saudi summit showed how he is still retaining his proximity to the US president and international influence. As Musk returns to his businesses as his primary focus, he is still primed to reap the rewards of his connections and political sway over Trump.


OpenAI's Sam Altman thanks Sen John Fetterman for 'normalizing hoodies'

FOX News

Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., receives praise for his less-than-formal attire from Sam Altman during a Commerce Committee hearing. Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., was one of the final senators to question OpenAI chief Sam Altman during Thursday's Senate Commerce Committee hearing, and the subject of both Three Mile Island and the Democrat's penchant for Carhartt outerwear came up. Fetterman said that as a senator he has been able to meet people with "much more impressive jobs and careers" and that due to Altman's technology, "humans will have a wonderful ability to adapt." He told Altman that some Americans are worried about AI on various levels, and he asked the executive to address it. In response, Altman said he appreciated Fetterman's praise.


Toward a digital twin of U.S. Congress

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this paper we provide evidence that a virtual model of U.S. congresspersons based on a collection of language models satisfies the definition of a digital twin. In particular, we introduce and provide high-level descriptions of a daily-updated dataset that contains every Tweet from every U.S. congressperson during their respective terms. We demonstrate that a modern language model equipped with congressperson-specific subsets of this data are capable of producing Tweets that are largely indistinguishable from actual Tweets posted by their physical counterparts. We illustrate how generated Tweets can be used to predict roll-call vote behaviors and to quantify the likelihood of congresspersons crossing party lines, thereby assisting stakeholders in allocating resources and potentially impacting real-world legislative dynamics. We conclude with a discussion of the limitations and important extensions of our analysis.