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Judge extends block on Trump's $1.8 billion 'Anti-Weaponization Fund'
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche says the government is scrapping its plans for the fund after bipartisan backlash
Online racism is significantly impacting mental health, First Nations people say: ‘It’s like carrying a bully in your pocket’
Australian Human Rights Commission has called for a digital duty of care to prevent social media algorithms from incentivising ‘racist’ content
House committee votes to halt prior authorization pilot impacting radiology services
Lawmakers have opted against authorizing funding for the Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction Model, citing concerns it will overburden patients and providers.
Why “Toy Story 5” star Tom Hanks doesn't think there needs to be a Best Voice Acting Oscar category
Hanks won back-to-back Academy Awards in 1994 and 1995.
Berkeley health officials say 1 dead, 1 hospitalized after contracting leptospirosis from rats
Health officials in Berkeley said one person died and another person was hospitalized after contracting leptospirosis from rats that had infested their RV.
CDC chief: ‘No evidence’ USAID cuts hampered Ebola response
The acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) denied Wednesday that the Trump administration’s cuts to foreign aid negatively impacted the global response to the ongoi…
How Trump’s reliance on ‘acting’ officials holding multiple jobs tests the Constitution
It feels odd that President Donald Trump tapped a housing expert to oversee the American intelligence community.
Carmelo Anthony praises Victor Wembanyama for shoving Knicks' Jalen Brunson
Carmelo Anthony is among the former Knicks players reacting to Victor Wembanyama's shove on Jalen Brunson in the NBA Finals.
Uber's take rate surpasses 50%, affecting driver income: study
Uber's take rate rises above 50% in some cities, impacting driver earnings, as it expands into new business areas, study finds.
DOJ reaches second settlement on youth gender care
A new era of American sunscreen, NIAID taps new acting director, and more health news from Morning Rounds
Quit job at Fortune 500 company to care for mom, now can't pay bills
Kathy Mullen, 64, left her job at a Fortune 500 company to care for her mother with Alzheimer's, negatively impacting her health and finances.
Iran war ripple effects are increasing risks of acute hunger for millions, World Food Program chief says
Ripple effects from the war in Iran are threatening millions more of the most vulnerable people with crisis levels of hunger or worse, World Food Program (WFP) acting Executive Director Carl Skau told CNN.
Microsoft AI head calls out Anthropic for acting like Claude is conscious
“This is exactly what we don’t want from AIs.”
How sky-high ticket prices, war & politics could impact the World Cup
The biggest World Cup ever starts this week. Laura Williamson, editor in chief of The Athletic, describes how sky-high prices, travel restrictions, politics and the Ebola outbreak are impacting fans. Williamson also discusses President Trump’s UFC event on the White House lawn. Ken Tucker reviews Kacey Musgraves’ album ‘Middle of Nowhere,’ which he says pairs well with the music biography ‘Gary Stewart: I Am From the Honky-Tonks.’
Xenoblade Genesis reveals director, composers, character designers
Nintendo didn’t have a whole lot to say about Xenoblade Genesis following the Direct reveal, but we now have information about its director, composers, and character designers. First up, Tetsuya Takashi is acting as general director. That shouldn’t come as a big surprise given his involvement with the franchise and Monolith Soft as a whole. Yoko Shimomura is the main...
Here’s what’s impacting the Ascension land market
Industrial expansion and retail demand are the main drivers in Ascension Parish’s land market as residential developers become more selective, according to Peter Laville with Elifin. Laville says Ascension’s strongest momentum is currently tied to industrial growth in Geismar and along the west bank, where major projects such as Hyundai Steel are creating demand for […]
Brendan Sorsby fallout: Georgia, Nebraska boycott future games vs. Texas Tech as Big 12, Big Ten mull action
Athletic directors and conference commissioners are reacting strongly to an injunction that restored Brendabfrn Soraby's for the 2026 season
Trump formally nominates his former personal lawyer Todd Blanche to serve as attorney general
President Donald Trump has formally tapped acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to take on the top law enforcement job on a more permanent basis, sending his nomination to the Senate on Monday.
We can create the future of science right now
Paul Litvak is the founder and Executive Director of the Robyn Dawes Institute and a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley. He has a PhD in Behavioral Decision Research from Carnegie Mellon where he studied emotions and the sunk cost bias. Over 15 years in industry, he solved a wide range of challenging technical problems. At Meta he created models optimizing the ad review process. At Google he ran experiments to measure social influence. At Airbnb, he was a product manager leading machine learning teams optimizing search ranking and price suggestions. He also co-founded and led product at Rhythmic Health, a venture-backed biosensing startup, creating an accurate low cost system using a color changing strip and a smart phone to measure salivary lactate. The bottleneck At this point, it is uncontroversial to say that science needs to stop using the PDF article as the unit of knowledge and currency. The unbearable slowness of scientific publishing, the profit motive and margins: I’m not saying anything new. The PDF also sucks because it’s hard to extract structured information, which makes it hard to do evidence synthesis. As a result, we do much less evidence synthesis than is needed. And evidence synthesis ultimately undergirds most policy and medical decision-making. I can see second-by-second real-time odds for any sporting or newsworthy event, but a school board can’t see the best evidence on whether their 8th graders should be taught algebra. As a society, we don’t treat this as an important problem. Again, not controversial. Not only is the problem well understood, but the solution has already been laid out. What we need is AI-assisted living evidence synthesis - (1) an open knowledge graph of atomic claims, (2) claims linked to evidence, (3) assessment and synthesis of each piece of evidence, and (4) continuous updating with new data. What few realize (yet) is that the technical capacity to build this vision for a significant portion of science already exists. Not only that, scientists and startup teams are already building many of these components. I know this because I’ve been surveying the space and talking to many of the builders. There are some missing pieces: for example, evaluations of how well some of the components work. But at this point, most of what’s missing is a fully end-to-end working integration of all of these parts. In the rest of this essay, I’m going to lay out all the parts of a working living evidence layer for science and who is working on them, and propose concrete next steps for building this system. What’s now possible The diagram above outlines the components of a living evidence synthesis platform, including some of the teams working on each component1. Scientific PDFs are processed into claims with associated evidence. The evidence is subjected to a forensic audit, methodological evaluation and robustness and reproducibility checks. Finally it’s given a weight in a continuously updating synthesis. What follows is a description and status of each component and a few of the teams working on them. Document understanding The first thing you need to be able to do is turn an article into structured data. Mostly that means parsing PDFs. There are often multicolumn layouts that confuse non-specialized PDF to text processing libraries. For scientific papers, there is the added complexity of parsing formulas and tables and figures. This is a really hot area - there are startups offering APIs, and it seems like a new open source package gets posted to Github every few weeks. What follows isn’t exhaustive. A package called GROBID was the state of the art for a while, they didn’t update their package for nearly two years until very recently. In the meantime reducto.ai released an AI powered PDF extraction API, PaddleOCR became popular, IBM released a model called Docling, and both Mistral and Gemini created models and libraries. I also know of at least one other well-funded psychology research group working on a paper parser. By contrast, there are few open evals in this space, with no extensive evals for complex table comprehension in particular. Nonetheless, I’m confident this will be a solved problem soon, given the combination of LLM advances and developer interest. Hypothesis level extraction There has been increasing interest in comprehending the extracted text of papers and linking information to evidence for each hypothesis. A lot of work has already been done. Trialstreamer (Marshall et al. 2020) and RobotReviewer LIVE (Marshall et al. 2023) demonstrated automated extraction of trial population, intervention, and outcome at scale on clinical RCTs. PaperQA2 (Skarlinski et al. 2024) and Ai2 ScholarQA (2024) extended this to retrieval-augmented question answering with citation grounding. Elicit, Consensus, and SciSpace operationalized claim-level extraction for end users. OpenEval (Booeshaghi et al. 2026) is the most recent and most ambitious: 1.96 million atomic claims extracted from 16,087 eLife manuscripts using Claude Sonnet 4.5, grouped into ~299,000 results, with LLM evaluations showing 81% agreement with human peer review on a 2,487-paper subset. None of these solutions link claims to test-statistics, as you would need to evaluate randomized controlled trials. This is why I built the evidence.guide API - to extract hypotheses and associated test statistics from behavioral science papers. The best public eval of this kind of extraction I’m aware of comes from the recent SCORE project - they had humans code thousands of psychology papers to extract their claims by hand. It would be extremely helpful to the world if all scientific PDFs were available as structured open data. I’ve been working to make this happen, both directly at Berkeley and through coordination with large entities I can’t yet speak of; as hard as it is to do, I think it’s possible2. Forensic audit A lot of work has been done on forensic audit, but some gaps remain. Of course, for biology papers that rely on images for evidence, there are a variety of tools (notably Proofig and ImageTwin) to spot anomalies. These are still well short of what sleuths like Elizabeth Bik can do on her own, but these tools are constant companions among fraud analysts. There’s someone working on auditing Excel files for anomalies, and a number of teams are automating numerical checks like GRIM and SPRITE, including Scrutiny project, the INSPECT-SR team as well as statcheck. The regcheck team is building a way to use AI to compare preregistrations to analyses in papers, to ensure there aren’t significant deviations. Nonetheless, there are many other kinds of anomalies to screen for, both public and less publicly known. And there are no formal evals for anomaly detection that I’m aware of. Still, there’s a lot to draw from in this space and I’m pretty certain we will be able to scan papers for most kinds of obvious anomalies in the near future. Methodological review This area has been white hot, though I fear for many of the startups in this space, because this capability may become commoditized. There are at least six different AI peer review companies, including Refine.ink, Reviewer3, ReviewerZero.ai, Q.E.D. Science, Paper Wizard, and Isitcredible. Coarse (a pun on refine) was also recently created as an open source alternative. These systems provide qualitative feedback on the content of papers, spotting methodological weaknesses and mathematical errors. They seem to work pretty well, and many academics report bitterly that they exceed the average quality of typical peer reviewers. But there are few evals here either. What evals exist so far involve using LLM-as-judge (circularity problems abound) or comparing against human reviews of questionable quality. What you’d ideally want is an eval that measures capturing known errors in papers3. Reproducibility and robustness Another active area has been using AI agents to automate computational reproducibility4 and robustness5 checks in papers that report numerical results. For more recent papers where data and code are available, AI agents can see whether they can re-run the analyses and produce the numbers reported in the published paper. In addition to a handful of individual academics who have been experimenting using Claude Code for this, the Institute for Replication is a leading group working on building an end to end system. The evals related to this problem are the most mature, with CORE-Bench (Siegel, Kapoor, Narayanan 2024) and PaperBench (OpenAI 2025) available to benchmark agents on this task. There is also work on getting AI agents to test alternative ways of analyzing the data to ensure the results are robust to small analytic design choices. Synthesis This is the most underdeveloped area where significant investment is required. Although some automated evidence synthesis systems exist — for example, otto-sr is building an AI agent to write systematic reviews — none of these incorporate the full range of paper level signals to weight evidence appropriately. Nor is there anything like an eval or a gold standard for a good systematic review. Arguably Cochrane reviews are the closest we have to gold standard human systematic reviews, though I’ve heard academics in the know complain about their uneven quality. A key question for a synthesis platform is how to weight anomalies and methodological issues in assessing the quality of a piece of evidence. This is an unsolved problem and one I’m very keen to work on. Continuous updating There are many pieces of basic infrastructure available for monitoring for new research and initiating updates. OpenAlex is the current open citation graph. Retraction Watch integrated into Crossref in October 2023. Scite tracks how citations support, contrast, or mention prior claims. The Living Evidence Network demonstrated continuous-update workflows in clinical guidelines. Engineering this is a relatively straightforward task. When you look over this technical architecture and all the progress being made, it’s hard not to be optimistic that a living guide to scientific evidence will be built. The stakeholders are ready The social infrastructure for this is starting to coalesce — it’s not just a pie in the sky academic exercise to imagine this coming into existence. Institutions like the Center for Open Science, the Institute for Replication, the INSPECT-SR, the Living Evidence Network and more are all working on scaling work to improve research quality. Funders are also aligned. The Sloan Foundation has funded living evidence work through COS. Coefficient Giving supports the Institute for Replication and COS. The Astera Institute and the Institute for Progress have shown interest in this space. NIH has established an Office for Replication and Reproducibility. Although there are (very unfortunately) serious headwinds in science funding generally, there is an active group of funders interested in metascience. A brief word about what I’ve been doing at RDI. First, as a Visiting Scholar at Berkeley I’ve been actively figuring out how a non-profit and a public university can conduct and make public the results of large-scale academic article data mining. With some of the money I raised from donors, I commissioned a legal analysis of recent case law and publisher text data mining (TDM) agreements in order to understand whether a massive open data mining of academic articles is possible (with caveats, it is). I’ve also been working to bring together stakeholders in this space, and identify gaps. I’ve also been doing some software development in this space, with more to come. A pilot proposal The assumption undergirding all of this is that an AI, given all this information, would make the right judgment about a scientific claim with lots of conflicting evidence, weighing all the factors appropriately. That’s the hypothesis we need to test. Randomized control trial research is the best place to focus on first. RCTs are used to make many of the important decisions in society - from medical trials to public policy changes. And they use a relatively uniform set of inferential statistics with lots of known and available diagnostics. Behavioral science experiments, within the broader realm of RCTs, should be first used as a testbed whose results can be generalized. Because behavioral science is at the vanguard of open science practices, replications abound (there are thousands of them) to serve as ground truth training data. Key Hypothesis Therefore the pilot would test, in behavioral RCTs that have been replicated, whether the quality of evidence for a claim can be used to accurately predict whether that claim will replicate. Secondary Hypotheses Compared to claims that replicated, non-replicated claims demonstrate a greater share of forensic anomalies in their source literatures. Hypothesis level claim and statistic extraction is accurate enough to scale living evidence without onerous human review costs. Replication prediction is more accurate than prediction markets6 or journal prestige. If all the different quality signals we gather do accurately predict which studies will replicate, then we can use that model to score evidence to power the living evidence layer. Why this is informative regardless of outcome If the pilot succeeds, the architecture extends to medical RCTs (where Living Evidence already operates and integration is mostly about claim representation), then to slices of basic biology with stable replication structure. If it fails, the field learns which quality signals are load-bearing and which ones metascience has oversold. Either result is a contribution to knowing what the literature supports. Implications for funders Because this burgeoning ecosystem of builders already exists, a well-informed philanthropic or government funder could play a crucial catalyzing role in bringing this future about. They could play at least three roles: creating open structured datasets, publishing open benchmarks and incentivizing the solving of key technical challenges. First, open archives of papers that the government maintains, like PubMed, could be turned into structured data amenable to large scale metascience and claim aggregation. I know the US government already has an interest in doing this, though some key open questions remain unanswered. How do you determine the best models and systems for accurately extracting information from papers? How can you establish a robust way to allow researchers to flag errors and correct them? And finally, how do you create a legal regime in working with publishers to maximize the scope of available papers? For the latter, a university or a private philanthropy may be better positioned to make structured data publicly available under journal subscription terms or fair use. Philanthropists or government funders could also coordinate to create or commission benchmarks that evaluate whether important problems have been solved. For example, an open benchmark for claim extraction from a range of different scientific article types would be extremely helpful. Ensuring the underlying data are accurate is vital for creating these evaluations. I’ve discussed opportunistically using various human-created datasets for this purpose, but a consistent problem is that errors in human data make it difficult for them to serve as a gold standard. Finally, with structured data and benchmarks available, the government or private philanthropy could use them to incentivize groups to develop machine learning systems that meet these benchmarks. Prizes are one potentially valuable tool for this. For example, you could establish a prize for a system that accurately updates a living meta-analysis for a small set of claims. Prizes are particularly useful as signals of problem importance, and can help create vibrant ecosystems of public and private research—see, for example the role the government played in kickstarting the current work on nuclear fusion. Conclusion The drawbacks of the current scientific publishing system are known. Scientists agree, metascientists agree, philanthropists agree: the published PDF plus citation graph isn’t the right substrate for maintaining a representation of the evidence base in science. The pieces needed to build the alternative either already exist or are rapidly taking shape. The community is forming around exactly this problem, with concrete partnerships and shared infrastructure. A pilot should start on behavioral science RCTs because that’s the slice of empirical science most amenable to legibility, where replication ground truth is richest, and where the failure modes are best documented. What’s been missing is the galvanizing mission to assemble these pieces into something that works. That’s what I’m proposing to build. *** 1 I have a broader field map that I’ll release publicly soon. This is me, building in public! 2 If this is something that you are excited about, please reach out and talk to me. 3 More on this very soon too! 4 This tests whether, given the code and the data, you can get the same statistics as reported in the published paper. 5 This tests whether the results are the same as a paper’s given alternative analytical decisions in conducting the analysis (like outlier omission). Closely related is the idea of a “multiverse” where you come up with many different ways of answering the same underlying research question with the same data, and test whether the results hold in all those alternative methods. There’s been work on the latter as well. 6 Some of the replications, e.g. those from the SCORE project, had paired the experiments with forecasts from prediction markets. So we get to look at this for free.
Mosquito bite prevention remains best defense against West Nile virus | Health and Human Services North Dakota
North Dakota Health and Human Services (HHS) reminds people that preventing mosquito bites is the most effective way to avoid West Nile virus. Although no human cases of West Nile virus have been reported to HHS so far this year, there is a risk of contracting the disease anytime mosquitoes are active.
Commentary: Eliminating contracting preferences hampers long-term growth
Two converging forces are reshaping American small business, and federal procurement policy just turned its back on both.
Commentary: Small businesses can overcome current government contracting uncertainty
Prepare for more complex requirements and identify opportunities that still exist — and there are still opportunities, advises two leaders leader in the field of women's economic development.
More than 40,000 Coloradans will need a new health insurance carrier next year. Here’s who is affected.
Cigna is withdrawing from the individual health insurance market nationwide starting in 2027, impacting more than 40,000 Coloradans.
Ancient Chinese medicine could transform hair loss treatment
A traditional Chinese medicinal root used for over a thousand years is attracting new scientific attention for its potential to combat hair loss. Studies suggest Polygonum multiflorum can block harmful hormones, activate hair-growth signals, protect follicles, and boost blood flow to the scalp. Researchers say the herb’s effects align remarkably well with both ancient descriptions and modern hair biology.
Justice Department rushes to defense of Chicago US attorney after weeks of turmoil
After two weeks of turmoil at the US Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Illinois, the acting attorney general has jumped in to publicly defend his leader on the ground in Chicago, Andrew Boutros.
Trump says he wants Pulte to further slash staffing at national intelligence office
President Donald Trump said Friday that he wants his new acting director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte, to cut the office, which has already been significantly scaled back during his second term.
Pacifica Pier closed after massive crack discovered; business at risk of demolition
The popular and iconic pier in Pacifica is shut down after a massive crack was discovered in the concrete on Thursday. This is a big hit to the community and is impacting businesses like the Chit Chat Cafe, which sits on top of the pier and said that it would likely have to be demolished.
Morning Preview: A Jobs Report Surprise, Immigration Showdown and Rising Heat Risks
Today, economists and consumers are reacting to a better-than-expected job report and regulators are rethinking how schools spend billions on internet access and classroom technology. At the same time, the first major heat waves of the season are putting pressure on public health systems as summer ...
Octopuses use mirrors to find food they cannot see
Octopuses may be even smarter than we thought. Researchers at Dartmouth found that octopuses can learn to use mirrors to locate food hidden behind them—a skill previously seen only in vertebrates like mammals and birds. After training, the animals correctly identified the food’s location about 73% of the time, showing they could use a mirror as a tool rather than simply reacting to a reflection.
Dan Campbell mocks reaction to Myles Garrett trade
Detroit Lions coach Dan Campbell had a message to send to those overreacting to the Myles Garrett trade.
Roma interested in Brahim Diaz, but deal appears difficult
The Champions League is an important showcase for attracting players from big clubs to join Roma. Gian Piero Gasperini’s team, which will return to Europe’s top club after seven years, has initiat...
Acting CDC director says US Ebola response more justified than COVID measures
Acting Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Jay Bhattacharya defended the Trump administration’s response to the Ebola outbreak Thursday, writing in The Wall Street Jour…
Trump says he will nominate acting AG Todd Blanche to permanently lead Justice Department
President Trump announces plans to nominate acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to permanently lead the Department of Justice after Pam Bondi's firing.
President Trump says he will nominate Todd Blanche to serve as attorney general
President Donald Trump says he will nominate Todd Blanche to serve as attorney general, tapping his former personal attorney who has aggressively pursued the Republican president’s agenda while leading the Justice Department in an acting role
WATCH: Bessent recalls telling acting intelligence director Pulte he was 'going to kick his ass'
Bessent said he made the comment in the summer of 2025. President Donald Trump named Pulte acting director of national intelligence this week.
Scott Bessent testifies he told Bill Pulte he was "going to kick his a**," not punch him in the face
Bill Pulte, President Trump's pick for acting director of national intelligence, is being met with some skepticism on Capitol Hill.
Johnson: Democrats ‘playing politics’ with FISA over Pulte appointment
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) lambasted Democrats for suggesting that President Trump’s appointment of Bill Pulte to be acting director of national intelligence could imperil reauthorization of the …
Battles in the Nation’s Courts Impacting Small Business
The NFIB Small Business Legal Center issued briefs on several cases impacting small businesses, including lawsuit abuse, free speech regulations, and more.
The Latest: Trump keeps immunity from tax probes while scrapping $1.8 billion compensation fund
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the Trump administration has definitively scrapped a $1.8 billion fund to compensate President Donald Trump’s allies, but the White House is sticking with the part of the deal that permanently drops tax claims against him
The Latest: Trump keeps immunity from tax probes while scrapping $1.8 billion compensation fund
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the Trump administration has definitively scrapped a $1.8 billion fund to compensate President Donald Trump's allies, but the White House is sticking with the part of the deal that permanently drops tax claims against him.
Robert De Niro Makes an Ariana Grande Confession
Robert De Niro is opening up about his acting gig with Ariana Grande.
The cult of objectivity has broken consciousness science
With 22 competing theories and no consensus in sight, the science of consciousness is lost. In this exclusive IAI interview, Berkeley psychedelics researcher and bestselling author of a new book on consciousness Michael Pollan insists that even though consciousness lies beyond traditional forms of scientific investigation, we should resist becoming dualists who see it as something radically different from ordinary stuff in the world. Instead, he makes the case for reimagining science itself: it must stop reaching for objective descriptions of physical reality, and instead embrace subjectivity as the indispensable core of all inquiry. Alasdair Craig: How did your experiences with psychedelics get you interested in consciousness?Michael Pollan: One of the things that happens on psychedelics is that they foreground consciousness. What formerly seemed perfectly transparent and ever present—and yet, non-existent, as water is to fish—suddenly you see it. The metaphor I use in the book is that psychedelics sponge the windscreen. Suddenly you realize: wow, there’s a windscreen, there is this phenomenon that’s mediating my relationship to reality. This is not an unusual realization on psychedelics. I think a lot of people are called to think about consciousness after psychedelic experiences. So that was the proximate inspiration for A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness (2026).And then there was a more specific way in which psychedelics influence the book. That was a particular experience I had on psilocybin. I had the sensation that the plants in my garden were conscious and returning my gaze, with their own point of view and agency, and I got curious as to how to evaluate an insight like that. I mean, what’s the truth quotient of insights you have on psychedelics? And I was reading William James—who, of course, wrote beautifully about mystical experience—and he said, we can’t judge the metaphysics here, but we should pay attention to two criteria: (1) How useful is it to think this is true? He was a pragmatist, of course. And (2) can we subject it to other ways of knowing to validate it? Because maybe we should treat these insights as hypotheses. And that’s kind of how I approach psychedelics, as a great generator of hypotheses, but they need to be tested against other ways of knowing. And so that led me down this long path exploring the science of plant intelligence and plant sentience.AC: I love your phrase, “smudging the windowpane of conscious experience.” So do you now start to think, actually, even when I’m not on psychedelics, I’m just seeing a screen all the time, which is not reality, but rather is my conscious experience, behind which reality is hidden?MP: Well, you know, not when I’m brushing my teeth and making breakfast! But yes, in meditation, certainly. I mean, one of the things you realize is that my experience happens to be this way now, but it could be another way. And many things can affect it. My morning coffee changes the screen in various ways, sharpens certain things.___The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness.___There’s this wonderful metaphor in Aldous Huxley’s book, The Doors of Perception, where he thinks we channel consciousness, and that what the brain does is edit it, and there’s a reducing valve. And psychedelics open the reducing valve wider. I don’t know that I’m ready to buy into the idea that consciousness exists outside brains, but I do love that metaphor because there are times when you are more conscious than others. I know I’ve switched from window pane to valve, but you know, a camera aperture can open wider or narrower. And I do have a sense of that. I have a sense of when I’m being less conscious, and when I’m being more conscious, by which I mean, you know, more present, taking in more sensory information. So when you start thinking about consciousness as a matter of degree, that changes things also.I think when we scroll on social media, obviously, we’re conscious. But minimally so, because we don’t have to generate our own thoughts. We’re basically taking these little hits from other people and thinking their thoughts.The process of writing this book made me kind of relativize everyday consciousness as just one type, which is exactly what William James said. Normal consciousness is one type, separated by the flimsiest of screens from the other types.AC: If we stick with the metaphor of the smudge on the window that you get when you take psychedelics, it seems like we’re saying that consciousness has become like an object that you’re looking at, right? You’re looking at the smudge and that just is consciousness. But sometimes we’ll talk about consciousness as a state that you’re in, rather than an object you can perceive. You’re either conscious or you’re not conscious. So it’s difficult to really know what sort of thing we’re talking about when we talk about consciousness, right?MP: Yeah. When you say that consciousness is an object, what’s the subject? Consciousness also? The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness. So we’re in a closed loop and when we get a perspective on consciousness, we’re not achieving any distance from it. That’s one of the problems with studying consciousness. Science is predicated on an objective, God’s eye view of things, and you never get that. There’s no such thing. SUGGESTED VIEWING The brain filters consciousness With Àlex Gómez-Marín But, yeah, there is this sense, I think, that consciousness is something you can approach. Certainly, when you’re writing and trying to recreate a conscious experience, it’s a fiction, but you’re standing back from it, and looking at it. But there’s no real subject-object distinction.AC: That’s so interesting, because when philosophers start talking about consciousness, they often talk about what they call “qualia”, which is their word for the felt experience of, say, the color red. And I think that way of speaking often makes us think of the qualia as an object, which you can see out there: the redness of red. But, as you say, we also want to collapse the subject-object distinction when we talk about consciousness. So there’s something strange going on here…MP: Oh, yeah, there are many strange things going on! *AC: Let’s talk about the varieties of consciousness. Apart from perceptions, there are, pains, emotions, thoughts, and so on. What is it that holds all this diversity together so that they all count as instances of consciousness? What is it that they all have in common?MP: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I mean, there is sensory information, right? Which we perceive coming from the world outside ourselves. And then there’s internal information, which is what’s called interoception. And this is very important too. This is where feelings come from—what are sometimes called homeostatic feelings—that are intended to get the brain to keep us in these narrow ranges of temperature and glucose and so on. That’s a very important part of consciousness. And according to some researchers, who I think are probably right, this is where consciousness begins, with these very primal feelings, like hunger and thirst and warmth and itch, and things like that. And then there’s this third thing, which is our thinking about thinking.And what holds all this together is, I think, the sense of self. Consciousness generates a self: it is probably an organizing principle. All this stuff is happening to the self. It’s a construct, I think, but it is very useful. It can connect all these different streams of consciousness to a single being or a place, metaphorically speaking.* AC: The first half of your book is about the science of consciousness. Is consciousness just another thing, like black holes or the origin of life, which we don’t yet understand, but which we should have every hope that science will one day get to the bottom of, or is there something special about consciousness that makes this unlikely?MP: It depends how you define science. As we define science now, it’s going be very difficult. Science since Galileo has had a set of rules or assumptions, which is that the proper remit of science is to deal with the objective, quantifiable, third-person world. And the physical sciences have done amazing work under that set of limitations. Galileo—for tactical reasons, not for philosophical reasons—said science should not deal with the soul, which at the time was what consciousness was considered to be. So what is subjective, what is qualitative, what is first person, we’re going to leave to the church, he said. And this was a good agreement, and it probably kept many scientists from getting burned at the stake. But it leaves science in an awkward spot, now that it wants to venture into that territory of qualities, of first-person experience. And I don’t think it has the proper tools. I think it will have to add to its toolkit in some way, and find a way to bring in phenomenology, or lived experience and introspection, which science is usually dismissive of.The challenge—we alluded to it earlier—is that the only tool you have to study consciousness with is consciousness. And what I mean by that is, the whole scientific enterprise is a manifestation of consciousness. As much as scientists like to flatter themselves with this idea that they attain a godlike perspective on what they study, when it comes to consciousness, there’s no such thing. And it’s fine for all the things you can step outside of and study from that perspective. But two areas it won’t work are consciousness and cosmology.___It could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.___With cosmology, too, you have to study the universe from inside the universe. It’s not that cosmologists haven’t made progress. We know a lot about the age of the universe and expansion and things like that. But we can’t penetrate what happened before the Big Bang. We just don’t have the tools because we can’t stand outside.The fact that there are 22 full-scale theories of consciousness tells you all you need to know: we’re kind of lost. And I was surprised to find that we are more lost than I thought we were when I started this. I thought that there’d be leading theories, or that we had experiments that we could conduct that would nail some of this down. And the fact is, we don’t.So, I don’t know if science can solve it. But, of course, we can change the rules of science. A really influential book for me was a book called The Blind Spot, by two physicists, Marcello Gleiser and Adam Frank, and a philosopher, Evan Thompson. It’s a reminder that science is a social practice. It’s organized in a certain way and it can be organized in a different way. But it has this huge blind spot at the center of it, which is its failure to recognize that it is a form of consciousness itself, and it doesn’t have a good way of taking account of lived experience.AC: On the one hand, I think you want to resist traditional dualism, which would say that consciousness is something magical, something supernatural, right? But on the other hand, you’re accepting that there is this division in reality between the stuff that you can investigate objectively and measure, and so on—the stuff that science has been good at finding out about—and consciousness, which, for some reason, you can’t objectively measure. Some would take this to suggest that the dualism is actually right. Is there a way of reconciling these two strands of your thinking?MP: To call it magical is full of value judgement. I mean, you could just say immaterial. The interesting thing is, I think, that intuitively we’re all dualists. And I don’t know whether that’s because we’re children of Descartes and other cultures are less dualist than we are. Or it may be because that’s how consciousness feels. It feels different than the body. It feels separate from the body. But I don’t think we should trust that intuition.AC: So let’s think about ways that science might be changed to get at consciousness. I suppose the starting point would be the way that you begin the second half of your book. You have this nice line from William James, where he says, “We now begin our study of the mind from within.” Could you give us some sense of the ways of studying the mind from within? What does this involve?MP: I don’t know what that science looks like. But one of the points I’m making is that it depends on the humanities. I found that I learned as much, if not more, about consciousness, from reading novels and poetry. There is a sense of the fullness and complexity of consciousness that you don’t get in any scientific account. I interviewed this stream-of-consciousness writer and I approached her as an expert on consciousness, and she is. So I think that dialogue is really important.I’m reading Ben Lerner’s new novel, Transcription. Just read the first page of this novel: it’s a man falling asleep on a train, going to conduct an interview, and there is the experience of being in the train, facing backwards, there’s the view outside, but there’s a reflection of himself through which he’s seeing outside. There’s the memory of dropping his kids off at school. All this is going on in one moment of consciousness. Scientists aren’t going anywhere near that. But I think it’s useful for them to think about. That’s where we’re trying to go: like, how does such a layered experience happen? You know, it also makes you wonder, could a computer ever do this? And it gives you some doubt.*AC: Before we get to computers, perhaps we could talk briefly about plants. How did you come to feel that they are sentient?MP: Well, it was a psychedelic experience, and it’s not unusual on psychedelics. In fact, there’ve been studies about how people become animists during psychedelic experience. Their belief in animism arises after a single psychedelic experience.You know, most scientists would say this is all a myth. But we have only 400 years of the age of enlightenment and science. Before that, we were animists, and if you go around the world, most indigenous cultures are still animists, and children are animists, by and large, until they go to school. So it could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.As I said, I wanted to test this idea, and see whether there was conventional scientific evidence for it. And there’s fascinating work going on in a field that calls itself—in a rather cheeky way—plant neurobiology. These are people who fully realize there are no neurons in plants, but they’re trolling conventional botanists! And they’re doing experiments that are demonstrating that plants can learn and remember, which is kind of amazing: how do you store a memory without neurons? They’re finding plants that can solve problems, that can hear and see. In fact, they have 20 senses to our five or six. For example, a bean plant looking for something to twine, and given a pole within eight inches or so of it, knows where that pole is and will aim its spiraling reach at that pole. What is that about? Is it bouncing signals off of it?One of the spookiest things is the fact that the same anesthetics that put us out put plants out. You might think that plants are already out, but they’re not. They’re just slow. If you take a plant with a fast behavior, like a Venus flytrap, and give it an anesthetic, it will stop reacting. So you have to ask yourself, what is lost when the plant is anaesthetized? Some state of alertness, of awareness, of its environment, of reactivity. I’m not prepared to call that consciousness, but maybe it’s sentience—which is a simpler form of consciousness, and involves the ability to sense what’s going on in your environment and assess what’s good and bad for you and act appropriately. That may be a universal quality of life.AC: Let’s turn from plants to AI. You point out that LLMs are trained on the internet rather than direct interactions with reality. You put this really nicely when you say the internet is not the world so much as a shadow cast by the world. So LLMs are living in this kind of shadow world, or in Plato’s cave, as you put it. What’s the significance of this for AI consciousness and moral consideration? And, to recall the beginning of our conversation, if we’re stuck behind a veil or screen of consciousness, are we also stuck in a kind of shadow world?MP: I don’t think they’re the same shadow worlds because our world includes nature and other people. And even if it’s mediated in some ways... There is a reality out there, and we are in relation to it, through consciousness. There’s friction with it. What’s missing from the LLMs is that friction with the real world. There’s more to the world than human representation, which is what they’re dealing with. And that means that so far, AI is a cultural technology for combining thoughts we’ve already had. SUGGESTED VIEWING Cracking the code for thought With Roger Penrose, Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, Max Tegmark, Güneş Taylor Genuine creativity is more than collage. A lot of what AI does now is tantamount to collage, putting this with that and you know, that’s part of art, certainly. But there are also genuinely new ideas that come into the world that don’t come in through manipulating the representations we already have. So it remains to be seen whether AIs can be truly creative in that more radical sense.But my arguments against AI becoming conscious have to do with the fact that the idea of AI consciousness is based on this faulty metaphor that the brain is a computer. There are dimensions in which the brain is like a computer—it certainly does its share of computation. But computers have this sharp distinction between hardware and software, and brains don’t. In a brain, hardware and software are identical. Every memory is a physical change to the brain. Brains are not interchangeable in the way computers are. So this idea that you could take the consciousness out and somehow run it on another substrate, a silicon substrate, seems foolhardy.Anyway, it’s a more extended argument, and I may be wrong. And when we move to computers that aren’t based on silicon—neuromorphic computers and things like that—all bets may be off.AC: Regarding your point about LLMs being stuck in the world of our representations—the internet or whatever—and not being able to interact with reality, are these representations, the world of the internet, themselves part of reality? We’ve created the internet, but it’s still a real thing that exists. And so while the LLMs may be trapped within that part of reality, they’re nevertheless within reality and interacting with it and so on. So it’s not obvious that there’s a barrier there to them becoming conscious and being creative.MP: Yeah, I mean, if our consciousness is built out of human culture, which is what we’re talking about with all those representations. But I tend to think consciousness comes a bit more out of nature and friction with the natural world, but...AC: So there’s a fundamental divide between the natural world and human artefacts?MP: And we lose track of that, and especially people in this computer world. You know, the people who are creating these AI systems, my guess is they’ve been into video games since the age of three, and they didn’t go outside a lot. And their own contact with nature is somewhat limited. I could be wrong, it’d be a very interesting thing to ask, all the wizards of AI, whether they like to go fishing and hiking and do things like that. Or were they on computers from a very early age? I interviewed Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who came to believe that LaMDA, the Google LLM out at the time, was conscious and deserved personhood. It was very clear that he didn’t see a distinction between this bubble in which he lived and the real world. And I think we’ve all been distanced from the natural world, and this is taking us even further away. But it’s still there, you know, and we still have bodies, and we’re still mortal, and we don’t live in a simulation.AC: I think that’s a great place to finish. Michael Pollan, thank you very much!
Playing the waiting game in California: From the Politics Desk
Plus, Trump picks an acting director of national intelligence.
WATCH LIVE: Senate Democratic leaders may address Bill Pulte for DNI, 'anti-weaponization fund'
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer criticized President Donald Trump’s decision to tap his housing finance director as acting director of national intelligence, saying Bill Pulte is “a partisan thug with no experience in intelligence.”
WATCH LIVE: Blanche testifies in House hearing as Trump considers dropping 'Anti-Weaponization Fund'
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is set to return to Capitol Hill on Tuesday after the Trump administration signaled it was pausing contentious plans to move forward with a nearly $1.8 billion fund that could compensate allies of President Donald Trump who believe they have been unjustly investigated and prosecuted.
Political gravity is coming for some of Trump’s most jarring ideas
President Donald Trump just keeps pushing the envelope — his appointment of a controversial housing official as the new acting director of national intelligence on Tuesday is the freshest evidence of that.
Sassuolo want Aquilani too after Torino interest
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Where Forensic Science Meets AI: eSleuth, Inc. Names Former ATF Director Ken Melson to Its Advisory Board
eSleuth, Inc., the AI-driven investigative platform putting the power of advanced data analysis and machine learning directly in the hands of investigators, today announced the appointment of Kenneth E. Melson, former Acting Director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, to its Advisory Board. Melson brings a rare depth of expertise spanning federal prosecution, agency leadership, and forensic science policy that directly strengthens eSleuth AI's mission to transform how la
Trump taps Bill Pulte as acting national intelligence director
He replaces Tulsi Gabbard, who resigned last month after revealing her husband's cancer diagnosis
New acting spy chief will be Bill Pulte, housing finance director who's attacked perceived Trump foes
Pulte’s current role involves ensuring the soundness of the mortgage market, but he morphed into a megaphone who went after the Republican president’s perceived political foes.
Trump names William Pulte as acting director of national intelligence
Pulte will take over from Tulsi Gabbard who recently announced she plans to resign the role at the end of June.
Trump names controversial top housing official to be acting director of national intelligence
President Donald Trump on Tuesday named housing official Bill Pulte, who has played a leading role in stoking the president’s retribution campaign, as acting director of national intelligence.
Trump names controversial housing official Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence
President Trump on Tuesday announced he's tapping housing official Bill Pulte to serve as the acting director of national intelligence to replace Tulsi Gabbard.
Star Fox for Nintendo Switch 2 Is Shaping Up to Be a Dream Remake
Star Fox on Switch 2 is shaping up to be a significantly expanded and surprisingly cinematic retelling of the Lylat Wars, thanks to an overhauled script that’s brought to life by some of the strongest voice acting and cutscene direction I’ve ever seen in a Nintendo game.
Ireland Contracting Nightly Sports Call: Jun. 1, 2026
Apple releases iOS 26.5.1 for iPhone, here’s what’s new
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Marseille’s Nayef Aguerd attracts interest from the Gulf
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Comedian Nate Bargatze's acting turn as a stay-at-home dad is helped by comedy cameos but lacks a cohesive story to connect the often disjointed scenes.
As feeds become entertainment hubs, marketers rethink social’s role
As social platforms become entertainment hubs, brands are acting more like media companies to capture attention and drive sales.
Dell unveils $699 XPS 13 laptop in challenge to Apple's MacBook Neo
Dell on Sunday unveiled its most affordable laptop, XPS 13, as the PC maker aims to capture market share from Apple's MacBook Neo by attracting students and young professionals.
Venezia talent Hainaut attracting €10m Rennes proposal
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Justice Ministry expands 'top-tier visa' program to attract foreign science and tech talents
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HOA residents should not be contacting repair vendors
After reading the association’s letter, the violation letter is fairly standard. Many associations have such a noninterference policy as part of their rules and regulations.
Acting Wake Forest Business Dean Stacie Petter named dean of the University of Richmond Robins School of Business
Stacie Petter, acting dean of Wake Forest University School of Business, has been named the dean of the University of Richmond Robins School of Business, effective August 1. Petter has served as acting dean of Wake Forest’s business school since January. Interim Provost Nell [...]
Ireland Contracting Nightly Sports Call: May 28, 2026
Veterans and Small Businesses Gain Federal Contracting Insight at Pharr Global Business Hub
The Pharr Economic Development Corporation, in partnership with The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Entrepreneurship and Commercialization Center (ECC), the APEX Accelerator, and the U.S. Small Business Administration, hosted the first session of its 3-part Government Contracting Series at the Pharr Global Business Hub.
The Rich Eisen Show - Hour 2: Patriots’ Outlook, FOX Sports’ Maurice Edu Talks World Cup, plus WWE Superstar Cody Rhodes
WWE Superstar Cody Rhodes and guest host Suzy Shuster discuss his upcoming showdown vs Gunther in Italy, reveals the favorite moments from his storied wrestling career, what goes into traveling with his championship belt, expanding his reach into acting, and more. FOX Sports Soccer Analyst Maurice Edu tells Suzy which selections and omissions from the USMNT’s World Cup roster surprised him the most, previews this summer’s tournament and reveals his pick to win it all, and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Inside Bruce Willis’ Health Journey: What to Know About the Actor’s Frontotemporal Dementia
Bruce Willis has been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, prompting his retirement from acting. Here’s everything to know about Bruce Willis’ health journey since his diagnosis.
South Carolina’s redistricting effort fails in the state Senate amid GOP opposition
Some Republican lawmakers changed their stance on enacting a new map before the midterms when early voting for the June primary began on Tuesday.
New breed of political prisoner arises in Britain as anti-protest sentences rise
More people are being jailed in England and Wales as a result of acting to prevent climate breakdown and the war in Gaza, research reveals
Dr. Olusimbo Ige out as Chicago health chief
Ige had served as commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health since November 2023. Fikirte Wagaw, the CDPH first deputy commissioner, will serve as acting commissioner.
Trump admin now requiring green card seekers to leave US to apply, potentially impacting hundreds of thousands
The Trump administration will now require people seeking green cards to leave the United States during the application process — a sweeping change that could upend the lives of hundreds of thousands of people seeking the right to legally and permanently live and work in the US.
Physics explains why gold stays pristine
Metals like copper oxidize — reacting with oxygen in the air — but gold doesn’t, thanks to a quick switch in atom arrangement on its surface.
Ebola outbreak live updates: WHO upgrades risk to 'very high' and warns virus 'spreading rapidly'
Meanwhile, an American doctor who was flown to Germany for treatment after contracting the virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo is "critically ill," his missionary group says.
As China tensions loom, US temporarily pauses Taiwan weapons sales due to Iran war, acting Navy secretary says
The U.S. temporarily paused weapons sales to Taiwan to ensure munitions are ready for potential Iran escalation, Acting Navy Secretary Cao testified.
Next on Native Bidaské: How U.S. Politics and Voting Rights Today Are Impacting Native Americans with Gwen Carr
In this episode of Native Bidaské, host Levi Rickert talks with political strategist Gwen Carr about how U.S. politics, voting rights, and elections are impacting Native Americans right now. They break down: Gwen shares her perspective as an Indigenous woman with more than 30 years in politics, including work in the Clinton administration, the DNC, […]
Minneapolis summer entertainment events announced for 2026
The Minneapolis Downtown Council has announced major summer events for 2026, including a Prince celebration, Twin Cities Pride and Red, White & BOOM! fireworks.
Cannabis Business Leans on Schedule III Listing, Asks US Tax Court to Recognize 280E Refunds for Prior Years
The IRS can’t dispute that medical cannabis falls outside the meaning of Schedule I or II ‘without contradicting the president, the acting attorney general and HHS,’ the company says.
Blanche meets with Senate Republicans as Trump’s ‘anti-weaponization’ fund faces trouble on Capitol Hill
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche will meet with Senate Republicans Thursday morning, a GOP aide told CNN, in an attempt to save the Justice Department’s “anti-weaponization” fund as the party weighs its fate.
Bonus 228: The $1.776B Political Question
Every so often a story comes along that is so brazen, so cleanly emblematic of the moment we are living through, that staying quiet about it feels like a kind of complicity unto itself. Monday’s announcement by the Department of Justice that the Acting Attorney General has unilaterally created a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to compensate so-called “victims of lawfare” is one of those stories. And the reason I want to write about it here, in a newsletter ostensibly devoted to the Supreme Court and the law and politics surrounding it, is that I’m increasingly worried that we’re asking the wrong institution to save us from one of the most offensive, alarming, and anti-constitutional things we’ve seen from any president in American history. As I explain below the fold, the Anti-Weaponization Fund is not principally a legal problem awaiting a judicial fix. It is a shockingly egregious political abuse—the President suing his own government, purporting to settle with himself, and routing nearly $2 billion from the Treasury to his own supporters as a not-so-subtle (and not-so-formal) reward, if not an incentive, for political violence. And the Constitution’s answer to political abuses of this kind and magnitude is a political remedy, not a legal one. In his majority opinion in NFIB v. Sebelius (the Affordable Care Act case from 2012), Chief Justice Roberts defended the Court’s endorsement of Congress’s power to adopt the individual mandate by noting that it is “not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.” As much of a judicial supremacist as I am, that sentiment is, for better or worse, an entirely correct (and, in the long term, normatively desirable) institutional assessment. One can believe in substantial judicial power without believing that literally every political dispute in our country can and should be resolved by unelected judges. The real upshot of this latest headline (among so, so many other similar headlines) is that it is past time to reinvigorate impeachment—not because conviction is realistic in this Senate, or even because impeachment itself is feasible in this House, but because forcing every member of Congress to vote on the record whether this brazen, corrosive, and affirmatively dangerous corruption is impeachable is itself a point worth fighting for (and fighting with our friends over). Assuming the courts will save us absolves our political leaders of both responsibility and accountability for allowing this kind of mischief to continue, and it absolves all of us of our responsibility to refuse to tolerate those who would just as quickly shrug their shoulders and move on. For those who aren’t paid subscribers, we’ll be back (no later than) Monday with our continuing coverage of the Supreme Court. For those who are, please read on.
Maternity care deserts are common in Louisiana. Compare states, parishes
Nearly one-third of Louisiana parishes face limited or no access to maternity care, impacting maternal and infant outcomes. Figures from Tulane University's Newcomb Institute reveal stark disparities across the state.
Ireland Contracting Nightly Sports Call: May 20, 2026
'The Boys' showrunner Eric Kripke says Queen Maeve actress Dominique McElligott has retired from acting
There's a reason Queen Maeve didn't make an appearance on 'The Boys' finale.
Trade, politics and inflation impacting state and county seasonal tourism
Drops are steep; rural communities trying to draw people from closer to home.
Jan. 6 officers sue to block payouts to rioters from $1.8B fund
The officers' attorneys filed the federal lawsuit on Wednesday, a day after Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche defended the fund's creation
Teen curfew at Camp North End is impacting business, store owners say
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Blanche faces senators on new Trump ‘weaponization’ fund, Epstein, budget cuts
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche faced lawmakers Tuesday for the first time since taking the role, answering to bipartisan questions about his department’s newly created “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”
MICC kicks off 2026 small business engagement, offers one-on-one sessions
JOINT BASE SAN ANTONIO-FORT SAM HOUSTON, Texas — The U.S. Army Mission and Installation Contracting Command kicks off its 2026 Advanced Planning Briefin...
Blanche defends nearly $1.8 billion 'anti-weaponization' fund
The acting attorney general told lawmakers there will be quarterly reports with information about payout recipients