x01a Research Archives

US Supreme Court rejects Massachusetts school gender-identity policy challenge – The Detroit News– news.google.com

pgnewser April 20, 2026 0

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Excerpt:

The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to hear a bid by parents to sue a public school district in Massachusetts over actions by teachers and officials to support the gender identity of students by not disclosing name or pronoun changes to parents without the child’s consent.

The justices turned away an appeal by the parents of a student who had self-identified as “genderqueer” while attending a middle school in the Massachusetts town of Ludlow after a lower court threw out their lawsuit.

Pro-Life Activist Targeted By Biden Walks Away with Massive Lawsuit Payout– www.westernjournal.com

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The pro-life activist and father of seven who was targeted with an FBI raid under the Biden administration won a lawsuit payout of over $1 million, one of the ministries supporting him announced earlier this month.

Mark Houck, who lives near Philadelphia, regularly ministered outside the Planned Parenthood location in the Center City neighborhood, sometimes taking his 12-year-old son to experience the harrowing work of trying to save babies on the brink of murder.

On one occasion in October 2021, a volunteer clinic escort verbally harassed his son with profane language, prompting Houck to shove the man to protect his child.

The Thomas More Society, which represented Houck, noted that the private case against him was dismissed after the clinic escort failed to appear at the hearing.

AI makes granular pricing easier, but consumer psychology may make it less profitable– phys.org

pgnewser April 20, 2026 0

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EXCERPT:
Big data, artificial intelligence and advanced pricing algorithms make it easier than ever for companies to fine-tune prices for individual products to closely reflect their unique value and cost. The conventional wisdom is straightforward: better data, better algorithms and sharper segmentation should produce better profits. But new research suggests that the most profitable answer isn’t always more fine-grained pricing across a product line. In fact, it is fewer, better-chosen price points.

Nine of America’s 15 Safest States Are Constitutional Carry States, NAGR Data Shows– www.usacarry.com

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Key Takeaways

  • The National Association for Gun Rights advocates for nationwide Constitutional Carry, citing data from the safest states without permit requirements.
  • Recent data shows that crime decreased in Florida and Ohio after adopting Constitutional Carry laws, contradicting opponents’ claims.
  • The safest states include Maine, New Hampshire, and North Dakota, all of which permit lawful carry without a permit.
  • Strict gun control states like California and New York report higher death rates compared to Constitutional Carry states.
  • Twenty-nine states now support the principle of carrying firearms without government permission, aligning with Second Amendment rights.

Unanimous Supreme Court Strikes a Blow to the Climate Lobby and Trial Lawyers– gellerreport.com

pgnewser April 20, 2026 0

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The decision will make it more difficult to take businesses to court that had contracts with the federal government.

The Supreme Court on Friday sent a lawsuit seeking to hold oil and gas companies liable for damage to the Louisiana coast back to the federal courts (SCOTUSblog).

The plaintiff bar took a big loss at the Supreme Court on Friday, which means a win for the economy and rule of law. In a unanimous decision (Chevron v. Plaquemines Parish), Justices made it harder to raid businesses by holding that federal contractors can’t be hauled into state courts for claims relating to their government work (Wall Street Journal).

Justice Alito didn’t participate because he has stock in one of the companies involved in the dispute. At the center of the case was whether or not Chevron could move their case from state courts to federal courts via the “federal officer removal statute.” Justice Thomas, writing for the majority, said indeed they can:  Held: Chevron has plausibly alleged a close relationship between its challenged crude-oil production and the performance of its federal avgas refining duties—not a tenuous, remote, or peripheral one—and has therefore satisfied the “relating to” requirement of the federal officer removal statute (Supreme Court).

Stanford’s AI Index for 2026 Shows the State of AI– spectrum.ieee.org

pgnewser April 20, 2026 0

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EXCERPT:

The capabilities of leading AI models continue to accelerate, and the largest AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, are hurtling toward IPOs later this year. Yet resentment toward AI continues to simmer, and in some cases has boiled over, especially in the United States, where local governments are beginning to embrace restrictions or outright bans on new data center development.

It’s a lot to keep track of, but the 2026 edition of the AI Index from Stanford University’s Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence center pulls it off. The report, which comes in at over 400 pages, includes dozens of data points and graphs that approach the topic from multiple angles, from benchmark scores to investment and public perception.

As in prior years (see our coverage from 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025), we’ve read the report and identified the trends that encapsulate the state of AI in 2026.

Former California Democrat Exposed Burning Through $75,000 in Campaign Cash on Booze, Luxury Hotels, and Uber Rides– wltreport.com

pgnewser April 20, 2026 0

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A former California congressman is facing serious scrutiny after federal filings revealed he blew through tens of thousands of dollars in leftover campaign funds on alcohol deliveries, luxury hotels, and rideshare bills.

Former Rep. Eric Swalwell, the Democrat who once ran for president and sat on the House Intelligence Committee, reportedly burned through roughly $75,000 in campaign cash on personal-looking expenses after leaving office, according to Federal Election Commission records reviewed by multiple outlets.

Fox News reported:

Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings show that former Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., spent more than $75,000 in leftover campaign funds on alcohol deliveries, luxury hotel stays, and rideshare services after leaving Congress. The filings reveal over 100 charges to alcohol delivery services like Drizly, more than $10,000 in Uber and Lyft charges, and roughly $26,000 in hotel stays including a $20,000 tab at the Ritz Carlton.

Chinese tech workers are starting to train their AI doubles–and pushing back– www.technologyreview.com

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Internet users have found humor in the idea behind the tool, joking about automating their coworkers before themselves. However, Colleague Skill’s virality has sparked a lot of debate about workers’ dignity and individuality in the age of AI.

After seeing Colleague Skill on social media, Amber Li, 27, a tech worker in Shanghai, used it to recreate a former coworker as a personal experiment. Within minutes, the tool created a file detailing how that person did their job. “It is surprisingly good,” Li says. “It even captures the person’s little quirks, like how they react and their punctuation habits.” With this skill, Li can use an AI agent as a new “coworker” that helps debug her code and replies instantly. It felt uncanny and uncomfortable, Li says.

Even so,  replacing coworkers with agents could become a norm. Since OpenClaw became a national craze, bosses in China have been pushing tech workers to experiment with agents.

Active-duty US Army sergeant’s wife detained by ICE in Texas, could be deported to Mexico– timesofindia.indiatimes.com

pgnewser April 20, 2026 0

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Sergeant First Class Jose Serrano, an active-duty US Army sergeant who served the military for 27 years, including several in Afghanistan, said the ICE is out of control after his wife Deisy Rivera Ortega, an El Salvadorian by birth, was detained by the ICE on April 14 in Texas. Ortega had an appointment at the immigration office in El Paso when she was arrested.Ortega came to the US in 2016 and was granted legal protection in 2019, CBS News reported.

Because of her legal protection, Ortega can’t be deported to El Salvador but the administration told 51-year-old Serrano that his wife could be deported to Mexico. “I don’t really understand why, because she followed the rules of immigration by the T since day one,” Serrano said, adding that his wife had an active work permit at the time of her arrest.”I love the Army.

(The) Army helped me out for almost 28 years. It’s not the Army, sir. It’s ICE,” Serrano said in his interview to the CBS. “ICE is out of control right now, taking away rights, as soldiers, that we have.”Serrano was born in Puerto Rico and the duo got married in 2022 He also submitted a Parole in Place application on behalf of his wife last year, a special program designed to offer deportation protections to military spouses or parents who are in the U.S. without legal status, but the case remained pending. The wife had a military ID labeling her as a spouse of an active-duty Army soldier.

A new, telling sign emerges about GOP’s midterm fears– www.dailykos.com

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It’s been about a week since now-former Rep. Tony Gonzales resigned from Congress after the Texas Republican admitted to having an unethical sexual relationship with at least one former aide, who later died by suicide.

Yet the state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, has yet to set a special election to fill Gonzales’ seat—and that silence is telling.

President Donald Trump carried Gonzales’ seat by just over 15 percentage points in 2024, according to data from The Downballot. In a normal year, that would make this seat a GOP lock.

However, this election cycle has been anything but normal.

Last year, Trump pulled New York Rep. Elise Stefanik’s nomination to serve as ambassador to the United Nations because he worried her seat would be competitive in a special election. And Trump carried Stefanik’s seat by nearly 21 points—making her Upstate New York district even stronger Republican territory.

Supreme Court will hear from religious preschools challenging exclusion from taxpayer-funded program– abcnews.com

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The Supreme Court will hear from Catholic preschools that say Colorado violated their religious rights by excluding them from a state-funded program over their admission policies.

The court agreed on Monday to take up the appeal from St. Mary Catholic Parish, which is supported by the Republican Trump administration.

Joined by the Archdiocese of Denver, the facilities argue it’s unconstitutional to bar them from a taxpayer-funded universal preschool program because of their faith-based restrictions on admission of LGBTQ+ families and kids.

The state said that religious schools are welcome to participate but are required to follow nondiscrimination laws. The program was created by a 2020 ballot measure and provides public funding for free preschool at centers selected by parents.

Pressure on Starmer grows over Mandelson vetting despite ousting of Foreign Office official – UK politics live | UK news– www.theguardian.com

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Meanwhile, Peter Mandelson’s replacement as British ambassador to the US has said the relationship between the two countries is in the middle of an “extraordinary moment”.

Speaking in Washington on Friday, Sir Christian Turner said that the transatlantic relationship, which has become strained due to tensions over the Iran war and Donald Trump’s intense criticism of Keir Starmer for his supposed lack of support in the conflict, was still “one of the deepest and closest alliances in history”.

He said:

I’ve now been in this job for about two months, and they said, ‘Come to Washington for a rest. It’ll be very calm. It’ll be very quiet. You’ll be okay.’

And we’re in the middle of this extraordinary moment, geopolitically, geoeconomically, and indeed for the transatlantic relationship.

It is, of course, all relative – 250 years ago we had a small disagreement. We were in the midst of a dispute back then.

To our credit, we’ve only tried to burn down the White House once since, and what began in that moment of tension has been forged into one of the deepest and closest alliances in history.

He added:

I like to think it’s a pragmatic partnership. It’s not one based in backwards looking and nostalgia. It’s looking forwards as it really secures security and prosperity for both Britons and Americans alike.

Cognitively Declining Trump Wants Praise For Being Able To Sign His Name– www.politicususa.com

pgnewser April 20, 2026 0

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The White House should not be used as the world’s most expensive assisted living facility, but that appears to be what is happening during the second Donald Trump administration.

The president was showing signs of decline when he ran to return to the White House in 2024. Trump consistently got facts wrong, forgot names, and jumbled up basic history to the point where he once blamed Joe Biden for World War II.

If the American people had been paying attention, and Democrats deserve some blame for being afraid to call out explicitly and repeatedly Trump’s decline to voters, they would have seen that Trump was cognitively fit to serve as president.

Trump has made decision after decision, starting with his obsession with tariffs and willful blindness to the advice of experts, that he would cause severe economic damage, and going through believing Netanyahu and going to war with Iran, which has demonstrated a severe lack of mental competency coming from the White House.

Pope Leo XIV lands in Angola, says it is ‘not in my interest at all’ to debate Trump– www.euronews.com

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After visiting Cameroon, Pope Leo XIV landed in Luanda, Angola on Saturday, where he was welcomed by faithful. The Holy Father is about to become the third pontiff to visit Angola, after John Paul II (1992) and Benedict XVI (2009).

Meanwhile, during Pope Leo XIV’s plane journey on Saturday he said that it was “not in my interest at all” to debate President Donald Trump about the US-Israeli war in Iran.

But the American pope also took the opportunity to set the record straight, insisting that not everything he says was directed at Trump, but reflects the broader Gospel message of peace.

As soon as Pope Leo XIV landed in Luanda he was scheduled to meet with Angola’s president, João Lourenço, and deliver a speech, the latest on a trip during which he has been stepping up his rhetoric, after becoming the target of criticism from Donald Trump.

Google AI Releases Auto-Diagnose: An Large Language Model LLM-Based System to Diagnose Integration Test Failures at Scale– www.marktechpost.com

pgnewser April 20, 2026 0

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If you have ever stared at thousands of lines of integration test logs wondering which of the sixteen log files actually contains your bug, you are not alone — and Google now has data to prove it.

A team of Google researchers introduced Auto-Diagnose, an LLM-powered tool that automatically reads the failure logs from a broken integration test, finds the root cause, and posts a concise diagnosis directly into the code review where the failure showed up. On a manual evaluation of 71 real-world failures spanning 39 distinct teams, the tool correctly identified the root cause 90.14% of the time. It has run on 52,635 distinct failing tests across 224,782 executions on 91,130 code changes authored by 22,962 distinct developers, with a ‘Not helpful’ rate of just 5.8% on the feedback received.

Venezuela’s Machado Says “No Regrets” Over Gifting Trump Nobel Peace Prize– www.ndtv.com

pgnewser April 20, 2026 0

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Venezuela’s opposition leader Maria Corina Machado said on Saturday she had “no regrets” about symbolically handing over her Nobel Peace Prize to US President Donald Trump in January.

“There is a leader in the world, a head of state in the world who risked the lives of his country’s citizens for Venezuela’s freedom,” she told a news conference in Madrid.

Machado presented her Nobel prize to Trump when she met him in the White House just two weeks after he ordered US forces to attack Caracas and snatch Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro.

Trump, who has long coveted the award, is currently embroiled in the Middle East war he started with his ally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with airstrikes on Iran at the end of February.

RFK Jr. Shuts Down Dem Rep Over Healthcare Cuts: “They’re Almost All Illegal Immigrants”– www.louderwithcrowder.com

pgnewser April 20, 2026 0

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While the left would like it if you believed millions of Americans are suffering as a result of losing their health insurance, that is not reality, according to RFK Jr.

Democrat Rep. Greg Casar asked if RFK has sat down and spoken with any of the people who have lost health coverage this year. According to RFK, however, “they are almost all illegal immigrants.” And if you are surprised by this, you are not paying attention.

It is also comical how Casar had no response to this claim, as the best excuse he got was that one person in his district lost health coverage.

According to the Budget Committee:

1.4 million of those estimated to be without health insurance in 2034 are illegal immigrants.

1.3 million of those estimated to be without health insurance in 2034 are already ineligible for the Medicaid program. The OBBBA ends Biden-era regulations that kept ineligible individuals enrolled—restoring integrity to the program.

CBO projects Medicaid enrollment in 2034 to be 79.5 million people under the OBBBA—higher than the total number of people enrolled in Medicaid as of January 2025.